Burning boy, p.63
Burning Boy, page 63
He was restless, he had always been restless, and whenever he tried to settle down somewhere, he would again fall victim to what Baudelaire termed la grande maladie de l’horreur du domicile, which can be loosely translated as “the great illness caused by a horror of home.” Few men and even fewer women are afflicted by this disease, but those who carry the bug feel an innate revulsion against the stifling comforts and complacencies of domestic life and want nothing more than to blow down the walls and be gone. The horror can produce many different kinds of rebellion—from the basest criminality to the most exalted idealism—but in all cases it gives birth to an adventurer, a young person who abandons the safety of the warm fire and the assurance of three meals a day and instead chooses to court risk, danger, and the uncertain outcome. Crane gambled at cards because he loved not knowing whether he would win or lose. Nor did he care a jot for comfort. The hard ground suited him just as well as a bed, and when the wind rose and the rain fell and the chill crept into his bones, that only made it more interesting. He had been that way ever since he was a boy, and now that he had passed the threshold into early manhood, he knew that he was going to die young. All the more reason not to play it safe—along with the added burden of having to cram in as much as he could in the shortest time possible. After the public bashing in the New York press, Garland had urged him to retreat to the country and begin work on a long novel. A tempting thought, perhaps, but how could Crane sit still when he was burning to be gone? So off he went to Florida and nearly drowned, and from that gruesome adventure he wrote what was probably his best story. Was it worth it? Again, there is no point in asking the question, not only because it has no answer but because it has no meaning. Now the page had been turned, and the boy had chosen to begin the next chapter with war. We can examine his motives long past our bedtime and on into tomorrow morning, but whatever complex reasons we might unearth during our discussion, it will all come down to this in the end: because he wanted to.
* * *
From Roads of Adventure (1922) by Ralph D. Paine:
Two men were dining in another curtained alcove adjoining, and the voice of one sounded vaguely familiar. It was not identified, however, until he began to read aloud to his companion something which was evidently in manuscript. He stopped reading to say:
“Listen, Ed, I want to have this right, from your point of view. How does it sound so far?”
“You’ve got it, Steve,” said the other man. “That is just how it happened, and how we felt. Read me some more of it.”
[After “Steve” has finished reading another section of the story:]
A silence in the alcove and Captain Edward Murphy commented:
“The Commodore was a rotten old basket of junk, Steve, but I guess I did feel something like that when she went under. How do you wind it up, when poor old Billie was floating face down and all those people came running down to pull us out of the breakers?”
[After “Steve” has read the conclusion of the story:]
“Do you like it or not, Ed?” asked Stephen Crane.
“It’s good, Steve. Poor old Billie! Too bad he had to drown. He was a damn fine oiler.”
When there came a lull in their talk, Paine and McCready pushed the curtain aside and made a party of it. Here were four of us, all in the same boat, as one might say, foregathered by a singular chance, and our combined experiences embraced all the vicissitudes of filibustering.… Young Captain Murphy was a man without a ship, but he hoped to get another one and play the game again.
Stephen Crane had never been robust and there was not much flesh on his bones, at best. Sallow and haggard, he looked too fragile to have endured his battle for survival with the furious sea, but his zest for adventure was unshaken. His thin face, mobile and very expressive, brightened when he talked of attempting another voyage. His indifference to danger was that of a fatalist.
* * *
That encounter took place in a Jacksonville café sometime after Crane’s return on February tenth, and for the next several weeks he searched for another boat to smuggle him into Cuba. The sinking of the Commodore had tightened the U.S. blockade, however, and filibuster traffic had all but stopped. For a time, there seemed to be a chance that Crane and Charles Michelson might be able to use Hearst’s yacht, the Buccaneer, to make the crossing, but that plan fizzled. Looking for another solution, he and Michelson (along with Captain Murphy) headed farther south to the swamplands outside Daytona, but nothing came of that long shot either. Strapped for funds, Crane sent an urgent telegram to Hitchcock on February twenty-fourth—“Wire here Heinemans payment little regiment or maggies very important”—and that same day Reynolds submitted “The Open Boat” to Scribner’s Magazine, which promptly accepted it with an offer of three hundred dollars. (Reynolds had been hoping for more, but Scribner’s refused to go any higher, and he accepted the terms on March ninth.) Other than two small items, no traces of anything Crane might have written during his month in Florida have come down to us. The first is an inscription in a copy of Maggie that he gave to the madam of a Jacksonville brothel, Lyda de Camp—“To Lyda / From her friend / Stephen Crane”—and the second is a brief letter he wrote to his brother William on March eleventh announcing a change in his plans:
My dear Will: I suppose you have again felt assured that I was the worst correspondent in the world but really I have been for over a month among the swamps further south wading miserably to and fro in an attempt to avoid our derned U.S. navy. And it cant be done. I am through trying. I have changed all my plans and am going to Crete. I expect to sail from NY one week from next Saturday. Expect me P.J. on Thursday. Give my love to all and assure them of my remembrances.
Needless to say, a month in the swamps was an exaggeration, as were most of the things Crane tended to write to his big brother Will, the substitute father he had been trying to impress ever since he was in knee pants. Not a month in the swamps, then, but a month in Florida, most of which he spent in Jacksonville, and mostly what he did in Jacksonville was see Cora. The romance seems to have caught fire then, and once they became a couple, it wasn’t long before they were talking about marriage. With Cora still trapped in her dead marriage to the absent Stewart, however, it was no more than talk at that point. She wrote to her brother-in-law in India, Colonel Norman Robert Stewart, asking for his help in persuading her husband to grant her a divorce, but before she received an answer, the situation took another turn. Cuba was now out of the picture, and if Crane meant to find his war, he would have to cross the Atlantic and go to Europe, where a large-scale confrontation between the Greeks and the Turks was about to begin. Cora understood that there would be no stopping him, but nothing could stop Cora either, and within a day or two a plan had crystallized: they would travel to Greece together. More than that, he would fix her up with a job once they made it to Athens, and rather than sit around in hotels and cafés while he was off at the front reporting on battles, Cora would become Imogene Carter, America’s first woman war correspondent. The transformation was so sudden and so radical that it defies understanding. A thirty-one-year-old twice-married woman, a professional mistress since the age of seventeen, a person so luxurious in her habits that she changed the color of the seat-cushion covers in her carriage according to what color dress she was wearing that day, now the owner of a thriving nightclub operation in Florida’s choicest resort town, she was willing to give up everything and run away with a boy she had known for only two months. Nor did she even hesitate, hightailing it out of Jacksonville so fast that she left a mountain of unpaid bills behind her, which resulted in a warrant for nonpayment of debts and the seizure of the furniture from the Hotel de Dreme by the local sheriff. La grande maladie de l’horreur du domicile. It turned out that she suffered from the disease, too, and when it came to the spirit of daring and adventure, Cora was fully the equal of her mouse.
* * *
They took the train to New York, and in the five or six days they were there, Crane went about the business of preparing for the trip. If he encountered no trouble from the police, it was probably because he was dressed more smartly than usual and they failed to recognize him when he passed by. Or else he got lucky. Or else (more probable) they simply didn’t know he was back in town.
He signed on with Hearst to cover the war for the Journal and then negotiated a separate contract with the McClure syndicate to furnish occasional longer articles about the war (“letters”) for the Sunday editions of various America papers as well as the Westminster Gazette of London. The recent telegram to Hitchcock shows that Crane was receiving money from his English publisher, a sign that he had smartened up and was now negotiating better contracts for himself, but he still wasn’t smart enough, for after making the newspaper agreement with the McClure syndicate, he then committed a colossal blunder, blindly falling into another one of McClure’s traps, as if his past dealings with the man had taught him nothing. Because Crane was still wanting for cash, and because it was difficult for him to imagine the long-term consequences of short-term expedients, he made a second contract that granted McClure first option on serial publication of upcoming, as yet unwritten short stories as well as first option on his next book, which evolved into a collection entitled The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure (1898). For those rights, McClure gave him an immediate cash loan of six or seven hundred dollars. It was an absurd move on Crane’s part—to accept the money as a loan rather than as an advance against future royalties—for now he would be in thrall to McClure, who could hold on to new stories as collateral against the loan and, if he decided not to publish them, effectively block the stories from being published anywhere else. This bungled transaction was probably the stupidest thing Crane ever did, and it put him in a spot no less dangerous than the one he had faced on New Year’s Eve when he’d set foot on the doomed Commodore, that “rotten old basket of junk.” Even more dangerous, as it turned out, since the loan from McClure pushed his finances permanently underwater, and from then on Crane lived as a drowning man, struggling for air until the day he died.
Not only did he owe McClure money, he was expected to start paying it back at once, and so even while he was still in New York, Crane began writing a story for him, which turned out to be the quite good but not exceptionally good “Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure,” which kept him so busy up to the time of his departure that he had to cancel his farewell visit to Port Jervis. Edmund scampered down from Hartwood and saw him off at the pier, but William couldn’t make it, nor could any of the others.
Sometime that week, he also managed to go out to dinner with Linson, who had been abroad until recently working as an illustrator for Scribner’s Magazine at the first modern Olympic Games in Athens, the very place where Crane would be going at the end of the week. The two friends had been out of touch for a year, and when Crane unexpectedly turned up at the old loft, he was given “a riotous welcome,” Linson remembers, but this was “a new Stephen … a rather dandified Steve. His hair was precisely brushed, his lip covering was much more than a mere shading, a well-fitting suit showed a trim, well-cut figure.… Yes, another Stephen.” The new clothes and the new look that had made him invisible to the police, perhaps, which no doubt was the result of Cora’s influence on him, for when a man falls in love with a fashionable, well-dressed woman, he no longer wants go to around looking like a slob.
Once they settled in and started to talk, however, Linson discovered that it was “the same Steve, after all.” Forty or fifty years after the fact, he quotes Crane as having said, “Willie Hearst is sending me for the war. What I’ll do among those Dagoes I don’t know. What are they like, CK? How did you chin their lingo?” Salty, slang-infected speech, and while it might not be exactly what Crane said that day, it seems to provide a fair sample of how he spoke to his friends.* More than anything else, Linson was impressed by Crane’s enthusiasm for the job ahead. “The excitement of it all was upon him. It was to be actual war, and his only fear was that it might fizzle out before he could arrive.”
They went to a restaurant at Fourth Avenue and Twenty-third Street, where they talked about old times and old friends, and eventually, “with a reserve characteristic of him when speaking of women,” Crane got around to telling Linson about the woman he wanted to marry, but “touching so lightly on the story of their meeting in Jacksonville that no memory of it remains.” Not wanting to shock his conservative friend, Crane withheld the woman’s name and avoided mentioning her past, but even though he intended to marry her in England, he said, her presence on the steamer was bound to provoke gossip (because of his reputation) and “the weasels would draw blood anyhow.” Unfazed, Linson encouraged him to hold fast and marry her as soon as he could.
They never saw each other again after that night. A good-bye dinner had been turned into a farewell dinner, but neither one of them was aware of it at the time. Seven pages later, Linson concludes his touching little book with a memory of that night:
As I last saw him, he was still a boy of twenty-five, full of the adventure ahead. I see a pair of serene blue eyes and a quiet smile, always as in a picture that mellows with the passing of the years. The sound of his voice comes to me, and the quick turn of his body, but it is the smile that lingers.
* * *
The Cunard liner Etruria left New York on Saturday, March twentieth, with Crane in one cabin and Cora in another. The bold adventurer was also a nervous prig when it came to social matters, and he kept up appearances by keeping his love life a secret from the other passengers. In all probability, he spent the better part of the weeklong crossing to Liverpool playing poker in the lounge, and in all probability Cora went along with the ruse, which continued after they reached London on Monday, March twenty-ninth, where she was both with him and not with him as Crane ventured out into public alone.
The visit lasted just three days, but he was given a warm welcome as “the one young writer of genius America possesses” (London Daily Chronicle), and after he left town on April first Arthur Waugh summed up the impression he had made in a neat little paragraph for the Critic (April 17):
Mr. Stephen Crane has flitted through London this week on his way to the scene of insurrections in Crete, but his visit was of the briefest. Indeed, it was characterized by extreme and refreshing modesty, being conspicuously free of the tendency to self-advertisement which is so often characteristic of the Novelist’s Progress.… Within a few hours of his arrival, he naturally made his first calling-place the house of his publisher, Mr. Heinemann, who has worked so hard to push his books in this country. He seems much pleased with the reception of his work in England, and jokingly remarked that he was off to Crete because having written so much about war, he thought it high time he should see a little fighting. Which proves him a man of humor—an excellent thing in letters.
Besides meeting his British publisher in London, Crane also met his American rival, double, and antithesis, the novelist and war correspondent Richard Harding Davis (1864–1916), an immense figure back then who continued to be a cultural reference more than a generation after his death. In Sinclair Lewis’s novel Dodsworth (1929), his name is evoked as an example of boldness and manly virtue: “When I graduated, I thought I’d be a civil engineer and see the Brazil jungle and China and all over. Regular Richard Harding Davis stuff!” In Alfred Hitchcock’s film Foreign Correspondent (1940), the following conversation takes place after a newspaper editor (Harry Davenport) hires crime reporter Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea) as his new foreign correspondent. A third man, Mr. Fisher (Herbert Marshall), is in the office with them.
Davenport: Jones … I don’t like that name. It’s going to handicap you, young man. Wait a minute. I’ve got some sort of name here. Yes, Haverstock. Huntley Haverstock. (To Marshall) It sounds a little more important, don’t you think?
Marshall: Oh yes, very dashing.
Davenport: Sounds better than Richard Harding Davis.
Marshall: Richard Harding Davis. Why can’t you use that?
Davenport: Oh, we can’t do that. That’s the name of one of our greatest war correspondents forty years ago.
The son of novelist Rebecca Harding Davis and journalist Lemuel Clark Davis of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, R.H.D. was the beau ideal of the age, so handsome that he served as the model for illustrator Charles Dana Gibson’s “Gibson man,” the escort of the famous “Gibson girl” of the shirtwaist advertisements. The combination of Davis the man and Davis the image is credited with having established the clean-shaven look among American men that became dominant in the twentieth century and has largely endured into the twenty-first. But R.H.D. had talent as well, not only as an intrepid, risk-taking reporter but as a successful writer of plays and light, entertaining fiction. At the end of his review of Maggie in Arena, Garland contrasted the socialite world depicted in Davis’s Van Bibber and Others (1892)—a popular hit—to the slum world of Crane’s book. “‘Maggie’ should be put beside ‘Van Bibber’ to see the extremes of New York as stated by two young men. Mr. Crane need not fear comparisons as far as technique goes, and Mr. Davis will need to step forward right briskly or he may be overtaken by a man who impresses the reader with a sense of almost unlimited resource.” From the very start, Crane and Davis had been put in a sort of competition, and with the older Davis already established as a top-rank reporter and world traveler, Crane was perceived as the dark-horse outsider in the race. He didn’t like it, nor did he like the thought of Davis or what he seemed to represent, and the normally live-and-let-live S.C. rankled at the mere mention of R.H.D.’s name. In a letter to Nellie Crouse, he took a swipe at Davis by calling him a “stuffed parrot” with “the intelligence of the average saw-log,” and even after they had met and served as correspondents together in Greece, he dismissed him as a “fool” in a letter to his brother William (10/29/97). Davis’s opinion of Crane was more nuanced. He was an admirer of Red Badge, which he considered to be “the last word, as far as battles and fighting is concerned,” and when he discovered that he and Crane both happened to be in London on their way to Greece, he hosted a formal luncheon for him at the Savoy hotel. Among the invited guests were J. M. Barrie (seven years before Peter Pan), Anthony Hope (author of The Prisoner of Zenda), and Harold Frederic, the American novelist and London correspondent for the New York Times who had written the glowing article about Red Badge and would become one of Crane’s closest friends during the years he lived in England. After the luncheon, Davis wrote to his mother that he had found Crane to be “very modest sturdy and shy. Quite unlike I had imagined.” But that didn’t prevent him from making some snide comments about Cora when he saw her at the London train station the next day, dismissing Crane’s companion as “a bi-roxide blonde who seemed to be attending to his luggage for him and whom I did not meet.” A month or so later, while Davis was at work during the thick of the war, he wrote to his mother again: “I left Athens with John Bass [of the Journal] and Crane accompanied by a Lady Stuart [sic] who has run away from her husband to follow Crane. She is a commonplace dull woman old enough to have been his mother and with dyed yellow hair. He seems a genius with no responsibilities of any sort to anyone.” Needless to say, Cora’s hair was not dyed, she was not old enough to be Crane’s mother, and she was neither commonplace nor dull. As Gilkes comments in her biography of Cora: “While Stephen considered Davis an egotistical fool, the dandified idol of college youth deemed the author of Maggie and the Bowery tales a gifted but unwashed lunatic, a boor with suicidal proclivities and unfortunate leanings toward low associations. Each however recognized in the other a core of professional integrity.” A trifle exaggerated, perhaps, but this was only the beginning of the story between Crane and Davis, and when they met up again in Cuba the following year, things took a far more interesting turn …
