Burning boy, p.67
Burning Boy, page 67
Thrilling speed. The magnificent monster is responsible for this whirl of shifting, novel sensations, and if it is moving along at an average speed of fifty miles an hour, there will be moments when it hits sixty or even sixty-five, turning it into a rocket of pure strength in that world without cars or planes. That such a monster can exist is the work of thousands, and that the monster can reach Glasgow safely and on schedule hinges on the rail company’s deft deployment of its scattered, far-flung army. In the end, however, it all comes down to the work of one man, and the full weight of the enterprise sits on his shoulders. If he fails to perform his job, everything else will be meaningless, and the work of all the others will go for naught.
It takes a while, but several pages into the article the reader finally catches on that Crane is riding up front in the cab with the man who is steering the train. For all the vivid commentary he has offered about the physical and emotional effects of riding the monster, it is this man who dominates Crane’s thoughts, and in the end, as much as the train itself, this nameless employee of the London and North Western Railway is the true subject of “The Scotch Express.”
This driver was worth contemplation. He was simply a quiet middle-aged man, bearded and with the little wrinkles of habitual geniality and kindliness spreading from the eyes toward the temple, who stood at his post always gazing out through his round window while from time to time his hands went from here to there over his levers. He seldom changed either attitude or expression. There surely is no engine-driver who does not feel the beauty of the business but the emotion lies deep and, mainly, inarticulate as it does in the mind of a man who has experienced a good and beautiful wife for many years. The driver’s face displayed nothing but the cool sanity of a man whose thought was buried intelligently in his business. If there was any fierce drama in it there was no sign upon him. He was so lost in dreams of speed and signals and steam that one speculated if the wonder of his tempestuous charge and its career over England touched him, this impassive rider of a fiery thing.
It should be a well-known fact that, all over the world, the engine-driver is the finest type of man that is grown. He is the pick of the earth. He is altogether more worthy than the soldier and better than the men who move on the sea in ships. He is not paid too much, nor do his glories weight his brow, but for outright performance carried on constantly, coolly, and without elation by a temperate, honest, clean-minded man he is the further point. And so the lone human at his station in a cab, guarding money, lives, and the honor of the road, is a beautiful sight. The whole thing is aesthetic.
What Crane is setting forth here is the description of an exemplary life. His admiration for the British train man is similar to the feelings he expressed for Billy Higgins and Edward Murphy of the Commodore and explains why he had no interest in interviewing the king or the crown prince when he was covering the war in Greece and chose instead to write an article about his conversations with six common foot soldiers. Do your job without fuss or fanfare, keep your head down and carry on because you have to carry on, remember that you are responsible to yourself and to others even if the others have no idea who you are—and don’t flinch. That was the path to honor, Crane felt, and as his thinking gradually matured, he had begun to formulate a personal credo of how the worthy life should be lived. “The Open Boat” had been the first step; this was the second.
“The Scotch Express” is a magazine article about a long-distance train ride from London to Glasgow, just one of many occasional pieces crammed into the immense, seven-hundred-and-fifty-page eighth volume of Crane’s Works, which gathers together all his sketches and non-war journalism. It is little known and has seldom been reprinted in anthologies, but beyond its literary merit, it shines a light on the evolution of Crane’s late work, that last frantic stretch when his engagement with the world flung him into broader and broader human territory and his optimism and pessimism both deepened. By late, of course, I am referring not to clock time or calendar time but to the things he wrote after his twenty-fifth birthday.
* * *
From Glasgow, Crane and Cora took the River Clyde steamer to Queenstown, now known as Cobh, and began their Irish holiday with the Frederics. By all accounts, the two couples had a splendid time living together in their large shared house, and as the pains from the carriage mishap receded, spirits rose, energy returned, and the earth spun around on its axis twenty-one more times. By September ninth, Crane had finished The Monster, and for the rest of the visit he explored the towns and coastal villages along the southern tip of Ireland, keeping his eyes and ears open as he prepared himself to churn out more words for the sake of home, food, and survival.
The “Irish Notes” consists of five short micro-sketches that add up to just sixteen pages in all, but each one is sharp, vigorously written, and assured. The small island had been home ground to a large swath of New York’s population for the past fifty years, and Crane seems to have been particularly intent on getting a feel for the ancestral motherland, which he strides into with more enthusiasm than he showed for any of the other new places he visited in the past: Hot Springs, for example, or Galveston, or even Mexico. By now, he had had a small taste of living in England, the empire that had ruled over Ireland for the past four hundred years, and because Crane distrusted power and instinctively tended to side with the underdog, he was sympathetic to the Irish before he ever set foot on Irish soil. A puzzling stance for someone who had mostly treated the transplanted Irish of New York as a pack of brawling drunks in his early fiction, but perhaps the young man was becoming wise in his old age.
The first of the sketches, “Queenstown,” is not only sharp but bursting with humor, and as Crane leaves the boat in a pelting downpour, he remarks:
Cork was weeping like a widow. The rain would have gone through any top-coat but a sentry-box. The passengers looked like specimens of a new kind of sponge as they separated to gloomy ways. From the dock to a railway station and thence to a hotel in Queenstown, the path of the traveller was lined with men not schooled merely in formulae; car-drivers, porters and guards who could apparently rise beyond a law and understand a joke, a poem or even an idiosyncrasy. The difference from England did not here exist in a conformation nor yet in the color of the turf. It existed in the gleam of a man’s eye.
This is the first comparison he makes between the Irish and the English, the contrast between the flexibility of mind and temperament he perceives in the one and the somber, by-the-book rigidity displayed in the other, which turns up again at the end of the article. Expressing his admiration for the Irishman’s “straight-out face-to-face courage of speech,” he imagines him the sort of person who “would attempt forty games of chess at one time and play them all passably well,” which is immediately followed by the concluding paragraph:
The rain disclosed the bay at last, and from the hill one could look down upon the broad deck of the Howe. Against the slate-colored waters shone the white pennant of the English navy, emblem of the man who can play one game at a time.
In the next piece, “Ballydehob” (a small village on Roaringwater Bay), he comes at the subject yet again, but the playfulness is gone this time as he evokes the ancient antagonisms that have trapped the conquerors and the conquered in a state of obdurate animosity toward each other for more than a dozen generations.
Nobody lives here that has any money. The average English tradesman with his back-breaking respect for this class, his reflex contempt for that class, his reverence for the tin gods, could here be a commercial lord and bully the people in one or two ways, until they were thrown back upon the defence which is always near them, the ability to cut his skin into strips with a wit that would be a foreign tongue to him. For amid his wrongs and rights and his failures, his colossal failures, the Irishman retains this delicate blade for his enemies, for his friends, for himself, the ancestral dagger of fast sharp speaking from fast sharp seeing—an inheritance which could move the world. And the Royal Irish Constabulary fished for trout in the adjacent streams.
That Royal Irish Constabulary gives the next piece its title, and lest there be any confusion, Crane is not referring to Irish policemen but to the British forces stationed in Ireland who watch over the so-called disturbed districts for signs of political trouble as they go about their business as officers of the law. “One cannot look Ireland straight in the face without seeing a great many constables,” Crane writes, and the garrisons are everywhere, even in such minuscule localities as Ballydehob, housing contingents of four to ten men for populations of just two or three hundred in what S.C. correctly describes as “an absolute military occupation.” Still, he can’t help feeling a certain pity for these young men, who are so thoroughly shunned by the inhabitants that they live in an isolation comparable to that of lighthouse keepers “at a bitter end of land in a remote sea.” They are not even granted the small courtesy of a nod or a mumbled hello, and when no one deigns to look at you, you become invisible. “All through the South of Ireland one sees the peasant turn his eyes pretentiously to the side of the road at the passing of the constable. It seemed to be perfectly understood … there was a line drawn so sternly that it reared like a fence.” And heaven help the girl who is caught flirting with one of those Englishmen—she will be ostracized or punished for it—and so to fill the vacant hours of their lonely lives, the members of the Royal Irish Constabulary fish for trout.
Crane drops the British after that. He has begun to acclimate himself, and the more fully he takes part in Irish life, the more he is able to see of it—to see into it—and savor its contradictions, for there is something about Ireland that resembles Crane himself, a continual shifting between gloom and brightness that he finally manages to capture in the fourth piece, “A Fishing Village.” A small puff of prose that lasts for just three and a half pages, it is set on an important day in the life of the town—the day of “the first respectable catch of the year”—and begins with “a little shriveled man, overcome by a profound melancholy, fish[ing] hopelessly from the end of the pier.” This is Mickey, disenchanted old-timer and remnant of a forgotten world, and when a young man in a blue jersey comes sculling up to him in a dinghy, his boat filled with “three round baskets heaped high with mackerel,” Mickey looks over the catch, shakes “his head mournfully,” and says, “Aw, now, Denny. This would not be a very good kill.” The young man snorts and replies, “This will be th’ bist kill th’ year, Mickey. Go along now.”
The conversation meanders on for a while, with Mickey lamenting the glory days when the fish were plentiful and “runnin’ sthrong in these wathers,” but no more, he says, no more, “A-ll go-o-ne now!” as young Denny puts his baskets into “the hands of five incompetent but jovial little boys to carry to a waiting donkey cart.”
After another paragraph in which he pauses to reflect on the differences in character between Denny and Mickey, Crane turns his attention back to the donkey cart, which leads to an extraordinary scene of all-out communal effort and coordination as the entire village takes part in preparing the fish for market, a collective enterprise similar to the one carried out by the railway company in “The Scotch Express,” but the scale is smaller and far more intimate here, and for the new Crane, the man who was reborn during the thirty hours he spent in the open boat—“the best experience of his life”—what he saw in that small Irish village on that particular day in mid-September 1897 is the closest he ever comes in any of his work to presenting a vision of terrestrial paradise.
The donkey with his cartload of gleaming fish, and escorted by the whooping and laughing boys, galloped along the quay and up a street of the village until he was turned off at the gravelly strand, at the point where the color of the brook was changing. Here twenty people of both sexes and all ages were preparing the fish for the market. The mackerel, beautiful as fire-etched salvers, first were passed to a long table, around which worked as many women as could have elbow room. Each one could clean a fish with two motions of the knife. Then the washers, men who stood over the troughs filled with running water from the brook, soused the fish until the outlet became a sinister element that in an instant changed the brook from a happy thing of the gorse and heather of the hills to an evil stream, sullen and reddened. After being washed, the fish were carried to a group of girls with knives, who made the cuts that enabled each fish to flatten out in the manner known at the breakfast table. And after the girls came the men and boys, who rubbed each fish thoroughly with great handfuls of coarse salt, which was whiter than snow, and shone in the daylight from a multitude of gleaming points, diamond-like. Last came the packers, drilled in the art of getting neither too few nor too many mackerel into the barrel, sprinkling constantly prodigal layers of the brilliant salt. There were many intermediate corps of boys and girls carrying fish from point to point, and sometimes building them into stacks convenient to the hands of the more important laborers.
A vast tree hung its branches over the place. The leaves made a shadow that was religious in its effect, as if the spot was a chapel consecrated to labor.
Meanwhile, old sourpuss Mickey is still at the end of the pier, fishing with the same hopelessness and futility as before. “Bad luck to thim,” he says to himself, and when the sky darkens and the ache of rheumatism crawls back into his bones, he stands up and reels in his line. “The waves were lashing the stones. He moved off toward the intense darkness of the village streets.”
Crane follows him into those streets and wraps up his five-part “Irish Notes” with “An Old Man Goes Wooing,” a little story about Mickey’s search for a bottle of stout in a pub crowded with a gang of noisy pig buyers who are being served dinner by a brawny, formidable young woman named Nora. The subdued Mickey waits for her as she rushes about hauling gigantic platters of meat to the boisterous pig men, and when he finally gets her attention and places his order, she is reluctant to serve him because she doubts he can pay for the bottle, but after he reaches into his pocket and digs out the two coppers required to complete the transaction, she gives him his stout, “stupefied.” He wanders off to a table, drinks his brown, foamy drink, and then dozes off with his face resting on his arms. Some time passes. When Nora looks up from behind the bar and sees that he has fallen asleep, she marches over to the table, yanks him from his chair, drags him across the floor, and pushes him out into the night.
Crane is Mickey. Crane is the village. Or else he is neither one nor the other and stands between the two, looking in both directions at the same time.
* * *
In the midst of these fruitful discoveries and pleasant days on the coast of Ireland, Crane wrote his last letter to Amy Leslie on September twelfth. Twice in April he had sent her money from Athens—a hundred dollars on the eighteenth; twenty-five pounds via Hawkins on the twenty-seventh (the equivalent of one hundred and twenty-five dollars)—but in neither instance had she received it. The first letter had gone astray because Amy had moved without telling him and he had sent the money to the old address, and the second letter arrived in New York about a month after the final bits of the original five hundred had been disbursed (leaving Hawkins four dollars in the hole), and having fulfilled the promise he had made to his friend, the weary, fed-up Hawkins had washed his hands of the business and returned the money to Crane. Crane still seemed to know nothing about Hawkins’s decision and even less about the missing hundred. He mentioned it in the letter he wrote to Amy from Ireland, but his principal reason for contacting her was to dispel any rumors she might have heard about his involvement with another woman. Word of Cora must have reached her somehow, and while no trace of her letter exists, his own letter confirms that she wrote to him about it, and just as she had lied to him about any number of things in the past, he now lied to her about this. It wasn’t that he had any interest in reviving his affair with her. That was over and done with as far as he was concerned, but fearing the storm of trouble she was bound to stir up if he told her the truth, he took the easy way out and lied.
My dear Amy: I am sorry to have you write to me in the way that you did because I will always be willing to do anything in the world for you to help you and see that you do not suffer. I never intended to treat you badly and if I did appear to do so, it was more by fate or chance than from any desire of mine. You do not say anything about receiving the $100. I sent you from Greece.… Did you get it? Let me know through Heineman. I am over here in the south of Ireland getting well from a carriage accident. It will be sometime before I get well. I had to leave off work and borrow some money to come here. I was doing very decently in London and would have sent you more money before now if it were not for the accident. As soon as I can I will send some to you if only it is a little at a time.
You know better than to believe those lies about me. You know full well what kind of man I am. As soon as I get home I shall want to know who told you them.
