Burning boy, p.73
Burning Boy, page 73
A simple child of the earlier plains has been given a glimpse of another world, and as he makes his exit at the end, both mystified and defeated, the heavy sands he walks over are the sands of time, and even if he has left some tracks in that sand, a wind will blow in before long and cover them up forever.
In the end, the charm of the story lies not so much in the clash between opposing forces—past versus future, Potter versus Wilson—but in Crane’s sympathy for both his protagonists and what each one represents. The anarchic gunman and the upright lawman are the two halves of Crane’s doubled, divided soul—the restless boy and the maturing young man, Crane the gambler and adventurer who prowled the corners of lowlife slums and rushed headlong into wars and Crane the sober, conscientious man of principle, the hardworking writer and newly married ex-patriot who was anticipating a shared destiny with “a good and beautiful wife for many years.” Crane was Scratchy Wilson, and Crane was Jack Potter, and he had just written his brightest comedy within weeks of finishing his darkest, most painful work. It was no longer a question of having to choose between one road and another road. There were two Cranes, and in that year of years, 1897, he had found a way to walk down both roads at the same time.
A couple of years later, he resurrected the two men from Yellow Sky and put them in a sequel, “Moonlight on the Snow,” which was published barely a month before he died. In it, Potter has moved up from marshal to become the sheriff of the county, and as he rides into the west Texas town of War Post to stop a potential lynching, he is accompanied by his new deputy—Scratchy Wilson.
10
Cora settled into domestic life with her customary flair for jumping off mountains and landing on her feet. Her “new estate” as a woman married to a man who lacked the wealth of a Thompson, a Stivers, or even a Murphy was not a hardship for her as much as a challenge. A savvy observer of trends in women’s fashion, she always managed to be smartly dressed for public occasions, but she invented a new and simpler style for daytime activities around the house, abandoning her elegant American footwear for a pair of Greek sandals that she’d commissioned from an Oxted shoemaker and walking around in a long, loosely flowing skirt and a puffy blouse with long sleeves and a tightly cinched bodice. It was a decidedly unconventional look for late Victorian England, and beyond the clothes there was the matter of her resplendent blond hair, which, in another break with convention, she often unpinned and wore trailing down her back, even when entertaining guests at Ravensbrook. As Gilkes notes, it was the same look that would later be perfected by Isadora Duncan—or, one might add, the flower children of the 1960s.
On quiet evenings, Crane played poker with Frederic, Barr, and other friends, but as time went on there were fewer and fewer quiet evenings. Word had gotten out that Stephen Crane was living in Oxted, and an influx of visitors began pouring into the house, all of them eager to rub shoulders with the young American star—who, of course, must have been loaded, one of the richest writers in the world. It became so overwhelming at times that Crane had to run off to London and hide out for two- and three-day stretches at Brown’s Hotel on Albemarle Street in order to carry on with his work—adding one more expense to the growing list of household expenses. John Berryman neatly sums up the problem in his book:
They came in hordes from London and America, to visit an old friend, to see the celebrity, to check up on the rumors, or to enjoy Cora’s memorable cooking. They brought each other, they brought notes of introduction, they invited themselves and the Cranes invited them. Both Stephen and Cora Crane were hospitable.… Both were long-suffering.… But money was flowing out and not coming in. The house was full of guests and fruit and flowers—they would spend three or four pounds for flowers [fifteen or twenty dollars] for a dinner.… By the end of November they were half-crazy with guests.
A crisis was looming, and when Crane wrote to his agent Reynolds in October, the letter was more than just a business communication about fees, word counts, and contracts, it was an urgent cry for help. He begins by offering to make Reynolds his exclusive literary manager for ten percent of his earnings and then explains that the first job will be to get him “out of the ardent grasp of S.S. McClure Co.” He believes he owes them five hundred dollars, but if Reynolds can negotiate a fair price for The Monster (twenty-one thousand words), perhaps that will wipe out the debt. No, maybe not all of it, but a good part of it in any case, and then there are the American rights for “The Bride” (forty-five hundred words), which he judges to be worth one hundred and seventy-five dollars. That story is “a daisy,” he says, “and don’t let them talk funny about it.”
From there he moves on to the money that can be earned from newspaper work, telling Reynolds about the different fees he has been given by the Herald and the World and alerting him about a dispute he has been embroiled in with the Journal. “I have quite a big misunderstanding with them and can’t get it pulled out straight. They say I am overdrawn. I say I am not.” He has sent them his “Irish Notes”—written for the Westminster Gazette in England—hoping the Journal will publish the sketches in America, but they have not yet responded. He would be satisfied with twenty-five dollars per installment (hardly more than the cost of buying flowers for an Oxted dinner), and “if the Journal will explain why I am overdrawn I am the last man in the world to kick and will pay the a/c in work.”
Last of all, he proposes a scheme to revive the Imogene Carter fashion and gossip column in as many newspapers as the market will bear. Promising to improve the quality and even to put his own name on the articles if that will help, he suggests that Reynolds go to Curtis Brown, “say how-how from me,” and find out if he would be interested. Nothing came of it, but merely to propose such a thing proves that Crane, heralded as he was, was still prepared to roll up his sleeves and dig ditches if he had to. He signs off: “Write to me at once. Good luck to you.”
Good luck. He had not yet reached the point of desperation, but he was becoming anxious, and if he didn’t act now to shore up his defenses against the approaching flood, it wouldn’t be long before the dam broke.
It didn’t help, of course, that Mr. and Mrs. Crane were living on credit and had already piled up substantial bills from the local shops—the butcher, the greengrocer, the wine merchant—that they were in no position to pay. Not to speak of indulgences such as the foie gras and caviar they served to their mostly uninvited guests at Ravensbrook, but the world was watching, and they both felt they had to keep up appearances. Happy as they were together in their new estate, they were too much alike for either one of them to put a check on the other. More than that, they were no different in what they expected from the future, and as one day melted into another, they lived under the shared delusion that things were bound to be better tomorrow or, if not tomorrow, then the day after that.
That same month (October twenty-ninth), Crane wrote a complex, soul-searching letter to his brother William. It is one of the longest letters he wrote to anyone, and wedged in among numerous practical matters concerning the family and some scattered remarks about the places and wars he will be traveling to but never did (the Klondike, the Sudan, India), there are several paragraphs in which Crane steps back and looks at himself, assessing his current situation and what could be, perhaps, a long-range plan for the future.
I have been in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, Turkey and Greece. I have seen Italy but never trod it. Since I have been here in England I have been in dreadfully hard luck. I have been here four months and one month I was laid up by the carriage accident. In the working three months I have earned close to 2000 dollars but the sum actually paid in to me has been only £20.17s.3d—about 120 dollars. In consequence I have had to borrow and feel very miserable indeed. I am not sure that I am not in trouble over it.
McClures, with security of over 1000 dollars against my liability of four hundred, refuse to advance me any money. And yet they think they are going to be my American publishers.
… My next short thing after the novelette (The Monster) was The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky. All my friends [who] come here say it is my very best thing. I am so delighted when I am told by competent people that I have made an advance. You know they said over here in England that the Open Boat (Scribner’s) was my best thing. There seem to be many Americans who want to kill, bury, and forget me purely out of unkindness and envy and—my unworthiness, if you choose. All the hard things they say of me affect me principally because I think of mine own people—you and Teddie and the families. It is nothing, bless you … I want you to promise to never pay any attention to it, even in your thought. It is too immaterial and foolish. Your little brother is neither braggart or a silent egotist but he knows that he is going on steadily to make his simple little place and he cant be stopped, he cant even be retarded. He is coming.
Sometimes I think you and old Ted worry about me and you may well worry! I have managed my success like a fool and a child but then it is difficult to succeed gracefully at 23. However I am learning every day. I am slowly becoming a man. My idea is to come finally to live at Port Jervis or Hartwood. I am a wanderer now and I must see enough but—afterwards—I think of P.J. and Hartwood.…
I am just thinking how easy it would be in my present financial extremity to cable you for a hundred dollars but then by the time this reaches you I will probably be all right again. I believe the sum I usually borrowed was fifteen dollars, wasn’t it? Fifteen dollars—fifteen dollars—fifteen dollars. I can remember an interminable row of fifteen dollar requests.
He is still posing to some degree—the letter is to William, after all—but by and large these paragraphs stand as one of Crane’s most honest attempts to tell the truth about himself. For the first time, the master of evasion opens up and confesses how badly he has been wounded by the continual attacks on him in America. Also for the first time, he admits that he has bungled his early success by acting like “a fool and a child.” His financial situation is bleak—not for the first time—but for once he does not ask his brother for help. And then, at long last, he finally acknowledges his incurable restlessness and his intention to remain “a wanderer” until the urge for travel has left him—whenever that might be. As for the dream of returning to Port Jervis and/or Hartwood one day, it is little more than that—a dream—or else an ingratiating gesture to William or, even more likely perhaps, a fantasy inspired by a sudden burst of homesickness: nostalgia for what he already knows is a world that has been lost to him forever. Most important—and these are the most moving lines in the passage—he is “slowly becoming a man,” and in spite of his struggles along the way, he has not abandoned his belief in himself and is convinced that his strongest work is still in front of him: “Your little brother is going on steadily … and he can’t be stopped, he can’t even be retarded. He is coming.” Needless to say, he says nothing about Cora or where precisely he is living, but that was the hand he had chosen to play ever since he arrived in England, and there will be no need to mention it again.
Nevertheless, the hidden Cora had become Crane’s hidden strength, the steady, encouraging voice that kept his confidence up and helped him forge on with his work even as the difficulties of their situation closed in around them. To be sure, that work was their sole source of income, and she knew their lives depended on his ability to keep the spout flowing, but there was more to it than just money. Cora’s faith in Crane’s genius was absolute. In her eyes, everything he wrote was a masterpiece, his talent surpassed that of any other living writer, and he was destined to become one of the immortals. Crane had always worked hard, again and again he had worked through difficulties in the past, but he had also wavered at times and fallen into holes of doubt and dejection over his worth as an artist. Hawker’s disgust with his paintings in The Third Violet mirrors Crane’s fits of disgust with his own work, but there had been no Cora back then, and now that she was in his life, his footing had become more secure and he was walking on firmer ground. The proof is in the quality of the work he turned out during the ten months they lived together at Ravensbrook. In the end, Crane’s reputation stands on six essential works: Maggie, The Red Badge of Courage, “The Open Boat,” The Monster, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” and “The Blue Hotel.” Half of them were written in the first year of their marriage.
* * *
No sooner was his Western comedy finished than Crane launched into “Death and the Child,” his first stab at a fictional representation of war since his own encounter with war in Greece. Given the general movement of his work in the past nine months, one would have expected something clean and simple and down to the ground, a narrative told in short, declarative sentences with no flourishes and only the barest, most functional imagery. Instead, Crane offers up a hallucination, an onslaught of wild, metaphorical language that surges on for twenty-one delirious, simile-clogged pages of dense, cosmological allegory—a mashed-up version of The Pilgrim’s Progress as conceived by Dante and written by Ducasse, the visionary French poet who wrote under the name of the Comte de Lautréamont and died at age twenty-four in November 1870, exactly one year before Crane was born. The Florentine cartographer who mapped out the journey from underworld to overworld and another burning boy from the late nineteenth century: European collaborators for Crane’s first European story, which is set in the middle of a European war and has a cast of entirely European characters, with an Italian hero of Greek origin who is mostly addressed in French.
The story begins with a scene of chaos and horror as hundreds of peasants rush down a mountain in panicked flight. No cause is given, nothing is explained, and not once is the word war mentioned. “It was as if fear was a river, and this horde had simply been caught in the torrent, man tumbling over beast, beast over man, as helpless in it as the logs that fall and shoulder grindingly through the gorges of a lumber country.”
This is the turmoil of hell, and once again (as in certain passages of Maggie) Crane, the supposedly clear-eyed, hard-nosed realist, is back in the world of Goya and Hieronymus Bosch. This is not reportage. It is a close-up view of the apocalypse.
And once again, as Crane has done so often in the past, nature looks on with supreme indifference.
The blue bay with its pointed ships, and the white town lay below them, distant, flat, serene. There was upon this vista a peace that a bird knows when high in air it surveys the world, a great calm thing rolling noiselessly toward the end of the mystery. Here on the height one felt the existence of the universe scornfully defining the pain in ten thousand minds. The sky was an arch of stolid sapphire. Even to the mountains raising their mighty shapes from the valley, this headlong rush of the fugitives was too minute. The sea, the sky, and the hills combined in their grandeur to term this misery inconsequent.
As the frightened mass of peasants streams downward, “a young man was walking rapidly up the mountain.” He looks at the horde with “agitation and pity,” but at the same time the people are not fully human to him, and as he studies their faces, “they seemed to wear … the expressions of so many boulders rolling down the hill.” In the first paragraph, the peasants were logs. Now they are stones. Living beings transformed into inanimate objects by the catastrophic circumstances of the moment.
The young man turns around and sees someone walking up the mountain behind him—a man in a lieutenant’s uniform, the first little sign that the circumstance of the moment is war. He speaks to the officer in French, flapping his arms and pointing “with a dramatic finger” as he blurts out wildly, “Ah, this is too cruel, too cruel, too cruel. Is it not? I did not think it would be as bad as this. I did not think—God’s mercy—I did not think at all.” He explains that he is a Greek or, rather, that his father was a Greek, and he has come here not to fight but to work as a correspondent for an Italian newspaper, for in fact he is Italian and has spent his whole life in Italy, where he was a student—a student—and he has come here now because of his father, who was Greek, and therefore he loves Greece, but he did not dream—
This is Peza, Crane’s ignorant, idealistic, snobbish young pilgrim who will set forth on a journey through a haunted, war-besieged landscape in search of a battle that will grant him the honor of spilling his blood for a noble cause. It is a sudden change of heart, but now that he has seen his first glimpse of war in the human boulders rolling down the hill, he feels compelled to trade in his pen for a sword and join the ranks of the fighting men. Seconds after he announces his decision to the lieutenant, Crane slyly introduces the first sounds of battle into the story. Far in the distance, Peza hears
a continuous boom of artillery fire. It was sounding in regular measures like the beating of a colossal clock—a clock that was counting the seconds in the lives of the stars, and men had time to die between the ticks. Solemn, oracular, inexorable, the great seconds tolled over the hills as if God fronted this dial rimmed by the horizon. The soldier and the correspondent found themselves silent. The latter in particular was sunk in a great mournfulness, as if he had resolved willy-nilly to swing to the bottom of the abyss where dwell secrets of this kind, and had learned beforehand that all to be met there was cruelty and hopelessness. A strap of his bright new leather leggings came unfastened, and he bowed over it slowly, impressively, as one bending over the grave of a child.
By ending the paragraph with an image of a child’s grave—Peza’s grave?—Crane is pointing ahead to the child in the story, an unnamed peasant boy who is the counterweight to the deluded, squeamish, highly educated correspondent turned soldier. We see the boy for the first time just two pages later, in the second part of the seven-part story, but not before the ignorant Peza has understood that “the universities had not taught him” how to adjust to a life of soldiering and that “this theatre for slaughter, built by the inscrutable needs of the earth, was an enormous affair, and … the accidental destruction of an individual, Peza by name, would perhaps be nothing at all.”
