Burning boy, p.76
Burning Boy, page 76
It is also Crane’s most claustrophobic and intricately devised existential puzzle, a story with few images that takes place mostly indoors and yet begins outdoors with a startling, unforgettable blast of color: a blue building planted on a flat, empty space two hundred yards from the small prairie town of Romper, Nebraska. It is called the Palace Hotel, and the owner of the establishment, an Irish immigrant named Pat Scully, had the bright idea to paint his wooden structure blue, “a light blue, a shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to declare its position against any background. The Palace Hotel, then, was always screaming and howling in a way that made the dazzling winter landscape of Nebraska seem only a gray swampish hush.” The hotel stands midway between the railway station and the town, and clever, enterprising Scully makes it his business to be at the station to welcome every incoming train “and work his seductions upon any man that he might see wavering, gripsack in hand.”
One morning, when a snow-crusted engine dragged its long string of freight cars and its one passenger coach to the station, Scully performed the marvel of catching three men. One was a shaky, quick-eyed Swede, with a great shining cheap valise; one was a tall bronzed cowboy, who was on his way to a ranch near the Dakota line; one was a little silent man from the East, who didn’t look it, and didn’t announce it. Scully practically made them prisoners.… They trudged off over the creaking board sidewalks in the wake of the eager little Irishman. He wore a heavy fur cap squeezed tightly down on his head. It caused his two red ears to stick out stiffly, as if they were made of tin.
When the prisoners reach the blue hotel, Scully conducts them inside, where they enter a small room dominated by “an enormous stove, which, in the center, was humming with god-like violence.” The smallness of the room comes as a surprise, and only little by little do we learn anything about the interior architecture of the hotel as the action moves temporarily to a downstairs dining room and to a couple of upstairs bedrooms, but never does Crane tell us how many floors or how many other rooms there are in the hotel, nor how many guests are staying there (just these three, as it turns out, but then again, it could be four), and although some Scully daughters make a transitory appearance to serve the midday meal, they are as silent as shadows and flit past the others unnamed and uncounted, since we are never told how many they are—whether two or six or ten. Much later, a Mrs. Scully will deliver a harsh reproach to her husband, but she speaks no more than a dozen words and then vanishes from the story. Crane, who could be as precise in his descriptions as the most exacting botanist and could have earned a good supplemental income by writing instruction manuals for the operation of complex heavy machinery, is being intentionally vague here, blurring some parts of his canvas while keeping others in sharp focus, which has the effect of suspending the reader in a state of continual uncertainty. The eeriness is augmented by Crane’s reluctance to tip his hand or even suggest that he is withholding information, and while he has made a point of telling us that we are in Nebraska, as the story unfolds we begin to feel that we are in fact at the outer edge of nowhere, locked in a self-enclosed no-place that resembles the set of a reductionist theater piece from the mid-twentieth century—Sartre’s No Exit, for example, or Beckett’s Endgame. Or a little dinghy with four men in it drifting on the surface of a vast, menacing ocean.
The first note of discord is struck the instant the four men walk into the small front room. Scully’s son Johnnie is playing a card game called High-Five with a middle-aged farmer (a guest? a neighbor? a stranger passing through?), and the two of them are quarreling for reasons that are never explained—the first touch of narrative vagueness, but also the first hint of narrative unease. The farmer is so angry that he punctuates his words by spitting tobacco juice—“with an air of great impatience and irritation”—into a box of browning sawdust behind the stove. Not bothering to ask what the trouble is about, Scully, “with a long flourish of words … destroy[s] the game of cards” and then orders his son to carry the bags of the new guests upstairs to their rooms. The reasons for this tantrum are likewise unexplained. Is Scully embarrassed by his son’s behavior in front of the new guests—or is this a long-standing problem that has triggered similar responses in the past? One way or the other, why doesn’t he apologize to the farmer? Without tackling any of these questions, Crane sends Scully upstairs as well, where the jolly/not-so-jolly innkeeper leads the men to three basins filled with “the coldest water in the world.” By the time the men have washed up and returned to the front room, the angry farmer has disappeared—as if he had never been there. Crane says nothing about the missing man, and because nothing is said the reader scarcely notices his absence. What is there and not there is less a matter of physical fact than what the narrator chooses to tell and not to tell. Crane tells as little as he can but as much as he has to, and by establishing a world in which certain pieces are missing, he traps us in an ambiguous story-zone where the world still seems solid enough, and yet, at the same time, is slightly off-kilter as well.
In the washing scene upstairs, Crane had already introduced the central business of the story, but in such a small and subtle manner that it, too, might have slipped by unnoticed. The cowboy and the Easterner had plunged their hands into the icy water and rubbed their faces until they were “burnished … fiery red,” but the Swede had “merely dipped his fingers gingerly and with trepidation.” Before the reader can ask why he would be spooked by a simple basin of cold water, the men are already downstairs again, settling around the stove for a brief, inconsequential chat before they are called in for lunch. Scully, the cowboy, and the Easterner take part in the conversation, but the Swede says nothing. “He seemed to be occupied in making furtive estimates of each man in the room,” and so great is the suspicion in his eyes that he appears to be “badly frightened.”
At lunch, however, the Swede exchanges a few words with Scully. He has come here from New York, he says, where he worked as a tailor for ten years. Scully tells him that he has been living in Romper for fourteen. When the Swede replies by asking some perfunctory questions about local crops and wages, Scully answers at length, but the Swede barely listens to him. One by one, he is carefully looking at the other men, and before the first chapter ends, he finally opens up a bit and reveals—nervously, self-consciously, with false good humor—what is preying on his mind: “with a laugh and a wink, he said that some of these Western communities were very dangerous; and after his statement he straightened his legs under the table, tilted his head, and laughed again, loudly. It was plain that the demonstration had no meaning to the others. They looked at him wondering and in silence.”
Again, Crane jumps quickly away from the paranoiac Swede, who will soon become the primary figure of the story, but before that there are other matters to attend to, for one thing the “turmoiling sea of snow” outside, which has turned into a full-scale blizzard and will keep everyone trapped indoors, and for another thing the mysterious farmer, who is not mentioned when the five men return to the front room but is suddenly there again when Johnnie challenges him to another round of High-Five. The farmer accepts “with a contemptuous and bitter scoff,” and before long the two are quarreling again, which brings the game to an abrupt end. Again, not one word is given about what caused the argument. The farmer stands up, looks at Johnnie with “heated scorn,” buttons his coat, and stalks out of the room “with fabulous dignity.” Buttoning up and leaving the room—but where does he go? Not, one would assume, out into the blizzard. Upstairs? But if he is a guest at the hotel, why wasn’t he in the dining room with the others when they sat down for lunch? Again, Crane says nothing about any of this. Another blur.
And yet, many pages later, in the final sentences of the story, we are forced to think back to the two unexplained quarrels between the farmer and Scully’s son at the beginning—before the story had settled into focus. If we can remember that the farmer was there.
As the farmer vanishes for the last time, the other men maintain a “discreet silence,” but the Swede bursts out laughing—loudly, childishly, inappropriately—which makes the four others ask themselves what in the world is ailing him, and then, and only then, does the crazy square dance begin. We are partway into the second chapter of the nine-chapter story, and everything up to this point has been mere prelude.
A new game was formed.… The cowboy volunteered to become the partner of Johnnie, and they all then turned to the Swede to throw in his lot with the little Easterner. He asked some questions about the game, and learning that it wore many names, and that he had played it when it was under an alias, he accepted the invitation. He strode toward the men nervously, as if he expected to be assaulted. Finally, seated, he gazed from face to face and laughed shrilly. This laugh was so strange that the Easterner looked up quickly, the cowboy sat intent with his mouth open, and Johnnie paused, holding the cards with still fingers.
Afterward there was a short silence. Then Johnnie said: “Well, let’s get at it. Come on, now!” They pulled their chairs forward until their knees were bunched under the board. They began to play, and their interest in the game caused the others to forget the manner of the Swede.
A blizzard is roaring down on the prairie around them, and inside the hotel, four men are packed into a room so small that it isn’t big enough for a table, huddled together with a square wooden board balanced on their knees, playing a game of cards that travels the country under different aliases, but not one of them is given here and consequently the reader cannot even begin to imagine what is happening. Cramped, awkward, and almost ridiculous, the four strangers are stuck together by the board on their knees, unable to move without jostling the cards and disrupting the hand. Under different circumstances, the situation could be construed as another one of Crane’s silent-comedy contortionist acts, but in the half-real, half-unreal blue hotel, the scene is not funny but bizarre, suffocating, and awful, unaccountably awful.
It is only a matter of time before the Swede begins to crack. Fingers trembling on the board, he gives the proprietor’s son a knowing wink and says, “I suppose there have been a good many men killed in this room.” Everyone is stopped in his tracks by this lunatic idea. Johnnie asks the Swede what in the hell he is talking about, but the ex–New York tailor won’t be budged and insists that they all know what he means. “Oh, maybe you think I have been to nowheres,” he says. “Maybe you think I’m a tenderfoot.” Johnnie doesn’t give a damn about who or what he is. All he can say is that no one has ever been killed in this room, and when the cowboy asks, “What’s wrong with you, mister?” the Swede begins to act as if he is “formidably menaced.” He turns to the Easterner for help, but the best the little man can do is pause for a moment before responding, and after he says, “I don’t understand you,” the Swede panics. “Oh, I see you are all against me,” he says, which soon escalates to the next level of fear—“I don’t want to fight! I don’t want to fight!”—which in turn leads him to the summit of self-induced terror: “I suppose I am going to be killed before I can leave this house!”
Although it was an age of remarkable advances in medicine and psychiatry (Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was written at the same time as “The Blue Hotel”), it is doubtful that Crane read any of the contemporary research into paranoia or psychosis, let alone ever talked to anyone about those subjects, but the condensed version of mounting delusion presented in this case is clinically accurate. If people are after you to begin with, sooner or later they will end up wanting to kill you. The offending others are not just enemies, they are a mortal threat.
Scully walks into the room, looks at the Swede’s troubled face, and demands to know what is going on. “These men are going to kill me,” the Swede says, which prompts Scully to turn on his son for the second time in the past two hours, but Johnnie swears he is innocent. The man must be crazy, he says, and picking up on the word, the Swede comes back with: “Yes, I’m crazy—yes. Yes, of course, I’m crazy—yes. But I know one thing.… I know I won’t get out of here alive.” Again, Scully asks his son if he’s been bothering this man, and again the son denies it. Meanwhile, the Swede declares that he will leave the house and go away, he will go away—“Because I do not wish to be killed.” In danger of losing one of his paying customers, Scully tells him to forget about going away, he is under his roof “and I will not allow any peaceable man to be troubled here.” As the Swede pushes past him to go upstairs and pack his bags, Scully looks at the three others and asks—for the last time—what is going on. Nothing, say the cowboy and Johnnie, and then the Easterner (whose name is revealed to be Mr. Blanc) says what amounts to the same thing: “I didn’t see anything wrong at all.” Scully goes upstairs to head off the madman.
Graciously, and with every ounce of his Irish charm, he does his best to pacify the Swede and induce him to stay. Even as the man is cinching the straps on his bag and getting ready to shove off, Scully rattles on about the modern improvements that are coming to Romper—the “ilictric street-cars” that will be installed next spring, the new railroad line that will connect the town to Broken Arm (Broken Arm!), the four churches, “the smashin’ big brick school-house,” and “the big factory, too”: “Why, in two years Romper’ll be a met-tro-pol-is.” It is a clever ploy. Convince the crazy man that this is not the old West of hired gunslingers and wanton murder but the new West of a dawning century, a safe place, a friendly place where men work in factories, children are educated in splendid brick buildings, and everyone worships God. The Swede, however, is unmoved. Without a single comment, he turns to Scully and asks how much he owes, but Scully doesn’t want his money, he says, and refuses to accept the seventy-five cents that are offered to him. An instant later, he comes up with a new plan. Guiding his reluctant guest across the hall to his own bedroom, he shows him a picture of his little daughter, Carrie, who died when she was young, and by demonstrating how deeply he still mourns her, perhaps he will get the Swede to understand that the citizens of the new West do not take the business of death lightly. No response. The Swede doesn’t bother to look at the picture, nor at the second picture Scully points to of his older son, Michael, who is a prominent lawyer in Lincoln “an’ doin’ well,” as if to prove that Nebraska is a place where the law is both respected and obeyed. Running out of ideas now, Scully changes his strategy, dives under the bed, and pulls out a bottle of whiskey. “Drink,” he says, as he thrusts it toward the Swede, but after a brief flutter of temptation (suggesting a fondness for alcohol) the Swede backs off and “cast[s] a look of horror upon Scully,” as if he suspects he is about to be poisoned. When Scully repeats his command—“Drink!”—the Swede lets out one of his loud, incomprehensible laughs, snatches the bottle, puts it in his mouth, and drinks, “his glance burning with hatred upon the old man’s face.”
Meanwhile, with the board still balanced on their knees, the other men have been talking downstairs, speculating about what has just happened. When the cowboy asks what makes the Swede act the way he does, the little man goes straight to the heart of the problem.
“Why, he’s frightened!” The Easterner knocked his pipe against the rim of the stove. “He’s clear frightened out of his boots.”
“What at?” cried Johnnie and the cowboy together.
The Easterner reflected over his answer.
“What at?” cried the others again.
“Oh, I don’t know, but it seems to me this man has been reading dime-novels, and he thinks he’s right out in the middle of it—the shootin’ and the stabbin’ and all.”
“But,” said the cowboy, deeply scandalized, “this ain’t Wyoming, ner none of them places. This is Nebrasker.”
“Yes,” added Johnnie, “an’ why don’t he wait till he gits out West?”
The traveled Easterner laughed. “It isn’t different there even—not in these days. But he thinks he’s right in the middle of hell.”
Crane had presented other such cases in several of his earlier works, characters who suffer from the Quixote-Bovary mania of reading bad, seductive books that distort their judgment and alter their perceptions of the real. Maggie Johnson, Henry Fleming, George Kelcey, and the Tenderloin pimp Swift Doyer are all victims of the disease. A cloud of false expectation stands between them and the world—a mist formed by the conventions of gooey melodramas and heroic tales of war—which prevents them from seeing that a crass, garishly costumed bartender, for example, is not a knight in shining armor, or that the girl you have fallen in love with cannot read the thoughts in your head just because you are in love with her. Those earlier characters gorged themselves on brain-softening works, but the Swede in “The Blue Hotel” has hardened his brain by immersing himself in the violence of cheap Westerns, and so rigid and locked-in have his false perceptions become that he has gone blind. The others see the world through a cloud, but when the New York tailor looks out at the world, he sees nothing. And not only is he blind, he is mentally ill. Like poor, crazy Quixote, he has crossed over the edge and believes he is trapped inside a book, which in this case happens to be a dime novel set “in the middle of hell.”
When Scully and the Swede come downstairs together, everything is suddenly different. The whiskey has produced a lightning transformation, and the two men enter the small front room laughing, as if they were a pair of revelers coming home from a banquet. The cowering, tremulous figure who was certain he was about to be killed has now aggressively taken charge, even to the point of “bullying” Scully at one point and talking “arrogantly, profanely, angrily.” When he leaves for a moment to fetch himself a glass of water, Johnnie asks his father why he doesn’t “throw ’im out in the snow.” The old man’s answer confirms what the Easterner has already told the two others. “‘Why, he’s all right now,’ declared Scully. ‘It was only that he was from the East and he thought this was a tough place. That’s all. He’s all right now.’” Then comes another meal in the dining room:
