Burning boy, p.74
Burning Boy, page 74
The boy is alone on the top of a mountain, a fairy-tale child who has been abandoned by his parents in their frantic rush to escape the enemy. This is almost humanly impossible, a lapse of mindfulness so egregious that not one parent in ten million would make it, but Crane had already visited this territory as far back as 1894—in the sketch now known as “The Fire,” originally published in the New York Press as “When Every One Is Panic Stricken.” In what was undoubtedly an invented detail, he had zeroed in on a woman who runs out of the burning building with a bamboo easel in her arms but has forgotten her baby and left it inside. Now, on a hilltop in Greece, a shepherd and his wife have taken off with their flock of sheep and somehow managed to forget their little boy. Not plausible, no, but realism is not at issue here, for the child is not a real child but a central component of Crane’s allegory, a creature of the natural world rather than the human world, a dream figure of unadulterated innocence.
The boy is playing on the mountaintop, ignoring the battle being fought on the flatlands below, and whenever the gunfire is loud enough to divert his attention from his game, he looks down with a “tranquillity … as invincible as the mountain on which he stood.” To emphasize the point, Crane comes back to it two paragraphs later: “The stick in his hand was much larger than was an army corps of the distance. It was too childish for the mind of a child. He was dealing with sticks.”
Meanwhile, Peza is blundering about like “a corpse walking on the bottom of the sea” or “a man groping in a cellar” as he looks for a regiment to attach himself to. Duty has called the lieutenant off in another direction, which has left Peza feeling both insulted and abandoned, but on he goes, staggering this way and that through a “vale of shells,” more and more certain that this haphazard journey is in fact a march toward his own death.
He encounters many soldiers along the way, both armed and unarmed, both wounded and intact, all of them weary, dirty, disheveled, and at last he comes upon a couple of uniformed men watching over a pack of mules, the two of them sitting side by side on the grass and talking “comfortably,” as if the war were no concern of theirs, that is, they have become so accustomed to war by now that they can take it calmly in their stride, and Peza is
proud and ashamed that he was not one of them, these stupid peasants, who, throughout the world, hold potentates on their thrones, make statesmen illustrious, provide generals with lasting victories, all with ignorance, indifference, or half-witted hatred, moving the world with the strength of their arms and getting their heads knocked together in the name of God, the king, or the Stock Exchange—immortal, dreaming, hopeless asses who surrender their reason to the care of a shining puppet, and persuade some toy to carry their lives in his purse. Peza mentally abased himself before them, and wished to stir them with furious kicks.
These are Peza’s thoughts, but they are Crane’s words, and whether they were written with the ironic detachment of an author standing back and expressing his character’s opinions or were indirectly expressing Crane’s own opinions through his character, this is one of the angriest, most misanthropic passages in all his work, a venomous denunciation that flies from his mouth like a great gob of spit aimed at all levels of society, the powerful and the powerless alike, the vast interconnected system of God, government, and capital that allows wars to happen and persuades the lunkheaded masses to fight in them. Buried in the middle of the story, these words illuminate the dark message that lies at the heart of “Death and the Child” and show how profoundly Crane’s thinking about war had evolved since he had gone to war himself. There are no redeeming virtues in rallying men to participate in slaughter. Win or lose, the fat cats always win, and win or lose, the bottom dogs always lose. Rant against it if you will, but that is the way of the world.
Ultimately, Peza winds up with a unit preparing to defend its position from an attack by the advancing Turks, who have emerged from the black lines in the rear as “an inky mass … shaped like a human tongue.” The university graduate, who knows the difference between a “fat, greasy” peasant and “a young student who can write sonnets and play the piano,” announces to the commanding officer that he wishes, above all else, “to battle for the fatherland.” The officer smiles, and because the stranger is armed only with a pistol, he points “to some dead men covered in blankets.” Peza doesn’t understand. He thinks the officer is “poetically referring to the danger,” but no, the officer explains, he wants him to take a bandolier from one of the dead men to use for the battle ahead. Peza starts to move his hand toward the blanket covering a dead soldier, but he stops midway, unable to go on, “as if his arm had turned to plaster.” Just then, the officer asks him if he has any tobacco, and the discombobulated Peza hands him his entire pouch. By way of thanks, the officer instructs one of his men to remove the bandolier for the rattled stranger, and that is the moment when Peza starts to come undone, for once he puts the long cartridge belt across his chest, “he felt that the dead man had flung his arms around him.” Then another soldier hands him a rifle, “a relic of another dead man,” and with “the clutch of a corpse about [Peza’s] neck,” the rifle becomes “as horrible as a snake that lives in a tomb.” He imagines he is hearing the low voices of the two dead men “speaking to him of bloody death, mutilation,” and then, inadvertently looking behind himself, he sees that the blanket has come off the face of yet another dead man. “Two liquid-like eyes were staring into his face,” and suddenly the unhinged Peza feels that the dead are pulling him downward into “a chamber under the earth, where they could walk, dreadful figures, swollen and blood-marked. He was bidden; they had commanded; he was going, going, going.”
He bolts to the rear, just as Henry Fleming bolted from his first test under fire, but unlike the boy in Red Badge, Peza does not have the luck to outrun his terror and live to see another day. He is shot, and as the other soldiers watch him flee into the distance, they think he has been “wounded somewhere in the neck, because as he ran he was tearing madly at the bandoleer, the dead man’s arms.”
In the last chapter, Crane returns to the mountaintop of his magic child. The boy has stopped playing now, and with the battle just at the base of the hill and the smoke rising and the noise turning into an uproar, he sits down on a stone to watch what is happening. Little by little, he begins to feel “astonished.”
Finally, without any preliminary indication, he began to weep. If the men struggling on the plain had had time and greater vision, they could have seen this strange tiny figure seated on a boulder, surveying them while the tears streamed. It was as simple as some powerful symbol.
Crane comes right out and says it here. The boy is not a boy but the embodiment of an idea, and the mountain he sits on is the same mountain that occurs again and again in the poems of The Black Riders, an extrusion of earth that reaches toward heaven and stands midway between the clouds and the mud below, an ideal vantage point to look down from to examine the follies of mankind. On some days, the gods laugh at what they see, and on other days they weep. Yesterday Crane laughed; today he weeps.
One could argue that the action in this paragraph is forced—and that by putting those tears in the boy’s eyes Crane is pushing too hard to hammer home his meaning. Perhaps he is. But this is an allegory, after all, not a depiction of everyday events, and Crane is so forthright in his intentions, even going so far as to call the boy a symbol, that if those tears are something of a misstep, they are also a bold narrative move. The directness and simplicity of the boy’s response is as pure as a line in one of Blake’s stark little songs, and if read in the proper spirit, the gesture carries the sting of a divine judgment—pronounced by a silent God who does not exist to a world that in any case would refuse to listen. The boy is hungry and has started to miss his mother. Calling out to her, he goes into the empty house, which is now occupied by a “pearl-colored cow,” who looks up and stares at him with her large, impassive eyes. Evening descends on the hills. Then something happens, and with that something Crane ends his nightmare treatise on the metaphysics of war:
The child heard a rattle of loose stones on the hill-side, and facing the sound, saw a moment later a man drag himself up to the crest of the hill and fall panting. Forgetting his mother and his hunger, filled with calm interest, the child walked forward and stood over the heaving form. His eyes, too, were now large and inscrutably wise and sad, like those of the animal in the house.
After a silence, he spoke inquiringly. “Are you a man?”
Peza rolled over quickly and gazed up into the fearless cherubic countenance. He did not attempt to reply. He breathed as if life was about to leave his body. He was covered with dust; his face had been cut in some way, and his cheek was ribboned with blood. All the spick of his former appearance had vanished in a general dishevelment, in which he resembled a creature that had been flung to and fro, up and down, by cliffs and prairies during an earthquake. He rolled his eye glassily at the child.
They remained thus until the child repeated his words. “Are you a man?”
Peza gasped in the manner of a fish. Palsied, windless, and abject, he confronted the primitive courage, the sovereign child, the brother of the mountains, the sky and the sea, and he knew that the definition of his misery could be written on a wee grassblade.
11
An almost forty-year-old Polish-born British subject (who “speaks and acts like a Frenchman”—Cora) and a transplanted American on the verge of twenty-six. The first one’s mother had died when he was seven, the second one’s father had died when he was eight. Both of them had been brilliant, distracted, flunk-out students, and both of them had lived through repeated deaths and dislocations in childhood. The first one had attempted suicide at twenty; at twenty, the second one had told himself and others that he would die young. Later on, both of them would survive shipwrecks, and now both of them wrote books, but because the first one had started late and the second one had started early, in the eyes of the world the boy stood taller than the man. Nevertheless, it was the boy who initiated their first encounter, which took place on October 15, 1897, when Sidney Pawling, the editor who oversaw the work of both men at Heinemann’s, complied with the American’s request by organizing a lunch for the two writers at a restaurant in central London. It must have been a fraught moment for both of them. Each one admired the other’s work, each one had found a spiritual connection with the other through that work, but writers, who are among the strangest, loneliest people on earth, rarely form deep and lasting friendships with other writers. They tend to cultivate a distant cordiality with their peers—when they aren’t stabbing them in the back or being stabbed in return—and even the ones they most admire often turn out to be the most difficult ones to bear. Who knows what these two were expecting when they walked into the restaurant that afternoon, but it is almost certain that each one was girding himself against disappointment. Precisely because they respected each other and saw each other as equals, precisely because neither one had ever formed a true friendship with a respected equal. As the older one recalled twenty-six years later: “We shook hands with intense gravity and a direct stare at each other, after the manner of two children told to make friends. It was under the encouraging gaze of Sidney Pawling who, a much bigger man than either of us and possessed of a deep voice, looked like a grown-up person entertaining two strange small boys—protecting and slightly anxious as to the experiment.”
With that timid, solemn handshake, Crane’s friendship with Joseph Conrad began. The small strange boys and their large editor were the only ones at the table that afternoon, and once the ice had been broken, the talk flowed freely, so freely that when Pawling looked at his watch, three hours had gone by and it was four o’clock. He jumped up from the table, announced “I must leave you two now,” and hurried back to his office, but the two writers, having no office to go to and no particular plans in mind, “went out,” as Conrad later put it, “and began to walk side by side in the manner of two tramps without home, occupation, or care for the next night’s shelter.” They continued talking as they rambled from one neighborhood to another, but mostly they were silent, “and the only allusion we made that afternoon to our immortal works” was an oblique remark from Conrad, “I like your General” (the most minor of minor characters in Red Badge), and an equally oblique remark from Crane about one of Conrad’s equally minor characters, “I like your young man—I can just see him.” This kind of reticence is not unusual among novelists, for contrary to what readers of novels might imagine, novelists rarely talk about their work when they are together, especially the ones who are most deeply in harmony. Conrad: “A stranger would have expected more, but, in a manner of speaking, Crane and I had never been strangers. We took each other’s work for granted from the very first.… Henceforth mutual recognition kept to that standard. It consisted often of an approving grunt.”
They paused for a while at a dreary A.B.C. tea shop, where they concluded that while “the scheme of creation remained as obscure as ever … there was still much that was interesting to expect from Gods and men,” and with that burst of optimism they went on tramping through the streets, “east and north and south again,” moving past Piccadilly Circus and Tottenham Court Road, when Crane suddenly—and inexplicably—asked Conrad to tell him what he knew about Balzac and the Comédie Humaine—“its contents, its scope, its plan, and its general significance, together with a critical description of Balzac’s style.” It was ten o’clock in the evening, and as they sat down to supper at Monico’s, Conrad obliged him by giving a hasty overview of Balzac’s work “in the rush of hundreds of waiters and the clatter of tons of crockery.” He adds: “I wonder what Crane made of it. He did not look bored.” And then, at eleven o’clock, they left the restaurant and parted outside on the street “with just a hand-shake and a good-night—no more—without making any arrangements for meeting again, as though we had lived in the same town from childhood and were sure to run across each other the next day.”
Three weeks later, Conrad sent Crane an inscribed copy of his first novel, Almayer’s Folly (“with the greatest regard and most sincere admiration”), along with the proofs of his soon-to-be-published third novel, The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” which had been appearing in installments since August in the New Review, and Crane wrote back on November eleventh—with an apology for sending the letter in care of Heinemann (he had lost Conrad’s note and address). Calling the new book “simply great,” he describes the death of Conrad’s character James Wait as “too good, too terrible. I wanted to forget it at once. It caught me very hard. I felt ill over that red thread lining from the corner of the man’s mouth to his chin. It was frightful with the weight of a real and present death. By such small means does the real writer flash out of the sky.” He then informs Conrad that he has written to Bacheller and told him “to be valiant” in regard to this book—the first of several acts of generosity he would make on behalf of his new friend—and, as it turned out, the good-hearted Bacheller came through by arranging for the American publication of the novel with Dodd Mead & Co., which changed the title to The Children of the Sea (even at the height of Jim Crow racism, Conrad’s original was considered too offensive). In the next paragraph, Crane invites the Conrads (Mr. and Mrs.) to come to Oxted one Sunday for lunch, any Sunday, after which they can stay on as houseguests for as long as they wish. And then a final, one-sentence paragraph before signing off: “Did not we have a good pow-wow in London?”
Conrad answered promptly on the sixteenth:
I must write to you before I write a single word for a living to-day. I was anxious to know what you would think of the end. If I’ve hit you with the death of Jimmy I don’t care if I don’t hit another man.… When I feel depressed about it I say to myself “Crane likes the damed thing”—and am greatly consoled. What your appreciation is to me I renounce to explain. The world looks different to me now, since our long pow-wow. It was good. The memory of it is good. And now and then (human nature is a vile thing) I ask myself if you meant half of what you said! You must forgive me.… That’s why one sometimes wishes to be a stone breaker. There’s no doubt about breaking a stone. But there’s doubt, fear—a black horror, in every page one writes. You at any rate will understand and therefore I write to you as though we had been born together before the beginning of things. For what you have done and intend to do I won’t even attempt to thank you. I certainly don’t know what to say, though I am perfectly certain as to what I feel.
By “intend to do,” Conrad was referring to Crane’s efforts to find an American publisher for his book, but as for the other matter—the invitation—it was impossible for him to accept just now, even if “it is perfectly right and proper from a ceremonial point of view that I should come to you first.” His wife was seven months pregnant with their first child, and she was in no condition to travel at the moment. Instead, Conrad asked Crane to “show your condescension by coming to me first.… Just drop a postcard saying I’m coming and I shall meet the train.… I should love to have you under my roof.”
Twelve days later, Crane went, covering the forty miles between his house and Conrad’s in a zigzag north from Oxted to London followed by a second train east to Stanford-le-Hope in Essex for a brief solo visit of one day and one night, with an early departure the next morning. “He came, was received as an old friend, and before the end of the day conquered my wife’s sympathy, as undemonstrative and sincere as his own quiet friendliness,” Conrad wrote. Her name was Jessie, and she had been married to Conrad since March 1896. She was young—two years younger than Crane—a working-class girl from a large family who had been employed as a typist when she met her husband. They had two children together, and years later, in her widowhood, she published several books of her own, among them Joseph Conrad as I Knew Him (1926) and Joseph Conrad and His Circle (1935). Her first impressions of Crane:
