Burning boy, p.7
Burning Boy, page 7
He soon proved himself to be unstudious, brilliant, volatile, entertaining, and giftedly profane. He was at that time in years about 19 and in worldly experience about 87.… He had a keen sense of the dramatic and his countenance usually displayed an amusedly satirical, but kindly grin. His keen mind instantly caught the absurd, bizarre, or ridiculous aspect of any incident and he would draw out an account of it in his own entertaining fashion.… My recollection of him is that of a boyish smiling young man, kind in heart, keen in mind. He saw into and through the conceits, hypocrisies, weaknesses and selfishness of mankind, but continued to smile with amusement [and] without bitterness.
Frederic M. Lawrence (future doctor and the closest of Crane’s Syracuse friends) sometime in the 1920s:
Having thus promptly and fearlessly raised the standard of revolt, Crane settled down to acquire such education as he desired in his own way. Already he was mature in mind. His intellect was indifferent to authority or tradition. It examined any new conception with complete detachment, reached conclusions with utter disregard for accepted beliefs. His room in the chapter house … speedily became a citadel for the un-Godly.… Crane, often taciturn, never by any means the most loquacious, directed the trends of thought. His own future was determined. He was to be a writer, and by no uncertain implication a great one.
He was scornful of the curriculum, argued contrarian points of view with his professors when he deigned to show up for class, but as Lawrence suggests in his piece (which goes on for many pages), Crane was privately pursuing his education in his own manner, and he read much during those months, including War and Peace and Anna Karenina (from then on, he would rank Tolstoy as his favorite novelist) as well as Goethe’s Faust and, even more important, Goethe’s Theory of Colors, which marked his work forever. It is also known that he inscribed his name in a copy of Keats’s collected poems, which he bought at a local bookstore, and that when he wasn’t reading books or floating around the city or pursuing girls or listening to music at St. Paul’s Cathedral or writing articles, short stories, and an early version of Maggie, he was playing baseball.
There is a photograph from that spring of Crane and his teammates sitting and standing together for an outdoor group portrait, nine young men in a motley array of uniforms and partial uniforms and one older man in the rear, undoubtedly the coach. Crane is in the middle of the front row, leaning back in his chair. His small, snub-billed cap is perched so far back on his head that it is hard to decipher, and his hair, which comes across as brown in the photo, not blond, is slightly unkempt. He is wearing a white sweater with a white collared shirt underneath it and traditional baseball pants that come down to his knees, with a pair of black baseball stockings covering the calves of his exceedingly thin legs. The legs are wide open, and because he is leaning back in his chair, he looks relaxed and confident, the very opposite of the self-conscious cadet who had posed for the camera just two or two and a half years earlier. His left hand is resting comfortably in his lap, but somewhat oddly his right arm is up, lying across the front of his body, and his right hand is closed, not quite in a fully clenched fist but in a three-quarters fist, what I would call a loosely clenched fist. It could be that he didn’t know where to put that right arm, since he is sitting very close to the player to his right, whose left shoulder is in fact blocking off Crane’s right side, so instead of putting his right arm over his neighbor’s shoulder, Crane lifted it against his own body, and then, not knowing what to do with the hand, closed it, so he wouldn’t block off his own face. Nevertheless, the hand resembles a fist, and while I wouldn’t want to impute a symbolic value to that fist or three-quarters fist, it is undeniably a curious touch. Not exactly aggressive or defensive—but poised and ready. The eyes look off into the distance. The expression on the face is neutral, pensive, detached, and the features are calm. Crane seems to have arrived at the threshold of understanding who he is, and he looks ready, ready for anything.
Syracuse University baseball team, spring 1891. Crane is in the middle of the front row. (COURTESY OF SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY)
THE PACE OF YOUTH
1
Mozart composed his first piece of music at five and his first symphony at eight. Chopin, Bizet, Liszt, and Glenn Gould all performed on the piano in public before they were ten. Jascha Heifetz and Yehudi Menuhin made their debuts on the violin at seven. Sammy Davis Jr. could dazzle variety audiences with his tap dancing at four. Picasso was an accomplished painter when he was still in his teens. Bobby Fischer won the United States Chess Championship in his second year as a teen and by the next year had become the youngest grand master in history.
Prodigies. Children kissed by the gods who claim our attention because they can hold their own against the adults in their field. It happens most often in music, sometimes in visual art, and occasionally in the pure, Pythagorean realms of mathematics and chess, but there are no prodigies in the domain of writing. The medium of language is far messier and more intricate than the stark geometries of number and form, and, as opposed to the wunderkinds on their pianos and violins, manual dexterity plays no part in becoming a writer. It takes years of living before one can feel at home in the labyrinthine complexities of language, and therefore writers develop slowly, often struggling into their late twenties and thirties before they manage to produce anything worth the ink in their pens. The poem Crane wrote at eight and the story he turned out at thirteen show immense promise, but they could never be confused with the work of an adult. Thousands of teenagers show promise, but few ever amount to anything, and even the most gifted ones must develop. Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein at nineteen, began her journey toward that book as an illiterate child, which was also true of the plays written by the astounding Georg Büchner (medical doctor, scientist, political revolutionary), who reinvented nineteenth-century dramatic literature with Woyzeck and Danton’s Death before his own death at twenty-three, whereas countless musical prodigies can read the notes of the bass and treble clefs long before they have mastered the letters of the Roman alphabet.
Like Mary Shelley and Büchner, Crane developed, developed almost as rapidly as they did, moving at such an accelerated pace that in the five and a half years he spent in and around New York (including the months he spent out west and in Mexico), he progressed from floundering apprentice to ferocious innovator, an artist in full possession of his talents and vision of the world. He did not, however, progress in a straight line. Until he struck out on his own, the little work he had published so far had been mostly of a satirical bent—light, humorous, even sardonic—and he continued writing in that vein after arriving in the New York area, putting in another two summers on the boardwalk at Asbury Park as society beat writer for his brother’s news agency and composing sketches and stories about life in the wilds of Sullivan County, New York, most of which were lighthearted in tone as well. At the same time, he was also discovering the world of Manhattan and digging more deeply into the ever deepening Maggie, one of the least comic and lighthearted books ever written, a pitiless, hallucinatory rendering of the New York slums that ran so counter to the moral pieties of the age that no publisher would touch it. At the same time. It is a phrase worth remembering, for the intensity and volume of Crane’s output was made possible only because he was always working on several things at the same time, meaning that when he was at work on his novels he was also writing short stories, sketches, and journalism, not just because he had to (out of financial necessity) but because he wanted to, and not just because he wanted to but because he had to (out of financial necessity).
About two-thirds of Crane’s best work was written during those five and a half years (from mid-1891 to the end of 1896). He had numerous friends and acquaintances, he fell in love at least three times, he went out to restaurants and theaters when he could afford them, he traveled north to Hartwood and did many other things besides write, but when one considers how much he did write, it scarcely seems credible that he was not holding a pen in his hand twenty-four hours a day every day over the course of those five and a half years. How else to account for the two short novels written during that period (Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother), the two longer novels (The Red Badge of Courage and The Third Violet), the Sullivan County sketches and stories, a collection of poems (The Black Riders), the Civil War stories gathered in The Little Regiment, and close to a hundred other works of fiction and nonfiction, including his trio of startling “Baby Stories” from 1893—“An Ominous Baby,” “A Great Mistake,” and “A Dark-Brown Dog”—as well as nearly all of his sketches about New York City, among them the unforgettable “An Experiment in Misery,” “The Men in the Storm,” “An Eloquence of Grief,” “Coney Island’s Failing Days,” “In a Park Row Restaurant,” “The Fire,” “Opium’s Varied Dreams,” and “The Devil’s Acre,” a dark, powerful meditation on the electric chair at Sing Sing? And all of these books, stories, poems, and sketches with all of their varied approaches and registers were sparking in him at the same time—which is to say, the young man had caught fire, and the question to be examined now is what caused that fire to ignite and how someone who claimed that he “began the war with no talent” could have won so many battles with himself and generated such a vast body of sublime and original work.
When Crane left New York at the end of 1896, he was twenty-five years old. He was also famous, unquestionably the most famous young American writer of the period, perhaps the most famous young writer the Republic had ever produced. It was the era of the large-circulation newspaper, and with eighteen daily papers published in New York alone (in addition to nineteen foreign-language dailies), America’s celebrity culture had begun, with all the clamor, adulation, and vicious cruelty that are still with us today. The publication of The Red Badge of Courage in September 1895 turned Crane into a celebrity. He hadn’t sought that fame, but fame had found him and singled him out, and once he was turned into the man of the hour, he was also turned into a target—not just for his opponents in the literary world but for the New York Police Department as well. He had stood up for a fallen woman in court, a known prostitute named Dora Clark (when she wasn’t calling herself Ruby Young or Dora Wilkins) who had charged an officer with false arrest, and because Crane had witnessed the scene and knew her charges were justified, he defended her, which led the police to go after him and try to destroy his reputation. Their efforts were largely successful, and for the rest of Crane’s life and long after his death, many considered him to be a dangerous, unwholesome person, a whore-mongering dope fiend and a blot on the fabric of society. It wasn’t that Crane wanted to leave New York, but after his apartment was ransacked in an undercover raid and he was subjected to continual surveillance and harassment, he had to leave for his own good. He had to run.
2
His first summer as an ex–college man started with a brief camping trip in Sullivan County and ended with a longer camping trip in Pike County, Pennsylvania. In between, he was back in Asbury Park, where he wrote twelve or thirteen more news items for his brother Townley, all of them in the same spirit as the ones from the previous summer except for the article on Garland’s lecture about Howells, which led to Crane’s friendship with Garland and, just as important, helped stimulate and crystalize his thinking about what kind of writer he wanted to be, since at that early stage he was still torn between conflicting impulses, on the one hand the tough, lyrical fury of his novella in progress, Maggie, and, on the other hand, the small, jocular works he was also writing that summer, the Sullivan County stories and sketches, which he would later disparage as belonging to the “clever school in literature.” Nevertheless, the nineteen-year-old Crane was cranking out those tales at a fast and regular clip, and his cleverness paid off, at least in the short run. Willis Fletcher Johnson happened to be spending the summer in Asbury Park, the same man who had employed Crane that spring as Syracuse correspondent for the New York Tribune and had acted as his co-conspirator in the Great Bug Hoax, but the two of them hadn’t met since Crane’s early boyhood, and the bold young man who was also an intensely shy young man hesitated to approach Johnson with his new work. He mentioned it to Townley, however, and when his big brother approached Johnson on his behalf, Johnson said of course, he would be happy to take a look at the kid’s writing. Crane showed him a couple of samples, each about two thousand words in length. “They were fantastic and impressionistic fiction pieces,” Johnson wrote in 1926. “I was very favorably imprest by them and told him so, and at once accepted them for use in the Sunday supplement of the Tribune. They, and a number more, were printed in that newspaper … and attracted much flattering attention.”
Sullivan County had once been part of the American frontier, a rugged area near the Catskills where white settlers had fought against the local Indians whose land they had usurped and where battles had been fought in the Revolution. (How many people remember that Last of the Mohicans is set in New York State?) It was still rugged and largely unsettled territory in the 1890s, but the only battles still being fought were the ones waged between hunters and unarmed wild animals. In June 1891, Crane went there with three of his Port Jervis friends to spend some time in the woods. One of them was his Syracuse classmate Frederic Lawrence (the future doctor), and the other two had been close to him since childhood, Louis Carr and Louis Senger. Lawrence writes about that camping trip in his piece from the 1920s:
We spent the days wandering into the nearby hills and occupied the daylight hours with pipes, books and conversation. In the evenings, we played cards, still with much conversation. For August we organized a real camp, almost a de luxe affair for those days, and spent four weeks in the wilds of Pike County, Pa. As I recall it, our days were devoted mostly to ransacking the shores of the adjacent lakes for logs with which to maintain the night’s huge camp fires. The choicest hours were those spent around its blaze, and when the light died down at last, we wrapped ourselves in blankets and slept on the ground like true savages. Crane loved this life, and his health was magnificent. As the month wore on, exposure to the sun gave his skin a copper color almost like that of an American Indian, and it formed a strange contrast to his still light hair. So great was the success of this camp that for several subsequent summers we made similar excursions into Pike County. Between times we made shorter journeys, often into Sullivan County, N.Y., and from our experiences there Crane drew inspiration for his first published stories.
Crane would grow disenchanted with those early efforts, confessing to the Boston Herald in 1896 that he wished he had “dropped them into the waste basket,” but they nevertheless deserve some attention, not so much for their cleverness as for certain flashes in the prose—invigorating sentences that dance and kick on the page—and for the embryonic articulation of ideas and methods that would begin to flower in Crane’s work just several months ahead. Of the nineteen Sullivan County pieces, written between the summer of 1891 and early 1892, fourteen were published by Johnson in the New York Tribune, one in the Syracuse University Herald (for old times’ sake?), and one in a bygone incarnation of Cosmopolitan (Crane’s first appearance in a national magazine). If nothing else, he must have found it encouraging to see so much of his work in print so soon after quitting college—at a time when he was only just beginning to clear his throat.
Eleven are works of fiction and eight fall into the category of sketch, essay, meditation, or whatever term one cares to use for a short work of nonfiction that ambles leisurely around a single subject. Those subjects are clearly delineated by their newspaper headlines, yielding such titles as “The Last Panther,” “Sullivan County Bears,” “Bear and Panther,” and “Hunting Wild Hogs,” which to my non-hunter ears does not sound terribly promising, but once you plunge in and start reading, the words carry you along, and after a couple of paragraphs it no longer matters if you are interested in hunting or not:
Children going to school were frightened home by wild hogs. Men coming home late at night saw wild hogs. It became a sort of fashion to see wild hogs and turn around and come back. But when the outraged farmers made such a terrific onslaught upon the stern and rock-bound land the wild hogs, it appears, withdrew to Sullivan County. This county may have been formed by a very reckless and distracted giant who, observing a tract of tipped-up and impossible ground, stood off and carelessly pelted trees and boulders at it. Not admiring the results of his labors he set off several earthquakes under it and tried to wreck it. He succeeded beyond his utmost expectations.… In the holes and crevices, valleys and hills, caves and swamps of this uneven country, the big game of the southern part of this State have made their last stand.
Other of the nonfiction pieces provide similar rhetorical flourishes and exaggerations of tone, most especially in “The Way in Sullivan County,” a sketch that deals with the nature of exaggeration itself.
A country famous for its hunters is naturally prolific of its liars. Wherever the wild deer boundeth and the shaggy bear waddleth, there does the liar thrive and multiply. Every man cultivates what taste he has for prevarication lest his neighbors may look down on him. One can buy sawlogs from a native and take his word that the bargain is square, but ask the same man how many deer he has killed in his lifetime and he will paralyze the questioner with a figure that would look better than most of the totals to the subscription lists for monuments to national heroes.
