Burning boy, p.79
Burning Boy, page 79
He understood that. Falsely overconfident as he could be at times, he knew that he would have to write a novel to pay off his debts and, if luck was with him and he managed to produce a hit, to sustain the extravagant life he was building with Cora. For that reason, not long after he started writing “The Blue Hotel,” he abruptly put the story aside and plunged into the novel he had been thinking about for the past several months, Active Service, a quasi-autobiographical story about an American newspaperman in Greece during the war. In his letter to Reynolds from December twentieth, he announced that he had written twelve thousand words out of a projected seventy-five thousand and might be able to finish the book by April or May. If they could scare up a large advance for him on the strength of a synopsis, he would push forward with it, but hard as Reynolds seems to have pushed on his end, he found no takers, and so Crane put the novel aside and returned to the story. These lunging, impulsive changes of heart suggest that he was growing frantic, inching ever closer to out-and-out desperation.
What Crane probably knew, but what he probably hadn’t found the courage to admit to himself, was that his star was fading. He had had his moment of glory with the accursed Red Badge, but sales had been dropping steadily for the past year, and with his American royalties blocked and no money to be earned from the book in England, the one thing he might have counted on was The Third Violet, which had received strong, encouraging reviews in the British press—as opposed to the critical drubbing it had been given in the States—but the little screenplay-novel hadn’t sold terribly well and had been written off as a commercial failure. Little matter that his work of the past two years had broken new ground. Few people understood it, and those who did were either wildly enthusiastic or scared off because, as one magazine editor wrote in a staff memo about “The Blue Hotel,” it was “too strong and brutal for [our] readers.” And besides, all that work had consisted of stories, accursed short stories.
Still and all, when he wasn’t panicking about money or scheming with Reynolds about their next move, he continued to plug away as he always had, not only on his stories for magazines and future books but on a number of occasional pieces as well, which were written for the pure pleasure of writing them and would have added no more than nickels to his depleted purse: a pair of exuberantly nutty forays into political satire, “How the Afridis Made a Ziarat” (New York Press, 9/19/97) and an anti-imperialist, Ubu-esque playlet, “The Blood of the Martyr” (New York Press, 4/3/98), as well as a generous puff about his friend Harold Frederic (Chap-Book, 3/15/98). In his cover letter to Reynolds about the last article, Crane wrote, “I am sending you a fifteen hundred word essay on Harold Frederic and his work.… I have written this at his request.… The price is not a particular point at this time.” As with the piece he wrote about Conrad, friendship trumped the demands of manufacturing words for dollars.
More important, he was also writing poems during this period, some of his best poems, as it turned out, many of which would be included the following year in his second published collection, War Is Kind. The Black Riders had rushed out of Crane in a single, unbroken frenzy, as if a voice trapped inside him had suddenly been unleashed, but then the poetic spout had run dry, and the voice went still. There were no more eruptions after that, but in the years since then he had been quietly working on new poems, two or three dozen in all, perhaps, which were composed in more varied registers than the “lines” written in 1894, from the angry, sarcastic “A newspaper is a collection of half-injustices” (here) to the gracefully flowing “I explain the silvered passing of a ship at night” (here). The new poems tended to be longer than first ones, but not all of them, as with these two, which remain close in spirit to the knockout pills in The Black Riders:
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
“A sense of obligation.”
Or:
The wayfarer
Perceiving the pathway to truth
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
“Ha,” he said,
“I see that none has passed here
“In a long time.”
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
“Well,” he mumbled at last,
“Doubtless there are other roads.”
But in lines such as “The chanting of flowers / The screams of cut trees” or “To the maiden / The sea was a blue meadow / Alive with little froth people,” Crane enters a new zone of lyrical daring, as he does in these lines from “The impact of a dollar upon the heart”:
The rug of an honest bear
Under the feet of a cryptic slave
Who speaks always of baubles
Forgetting place, multitude, work and state,
Champing and mouthing of hats
Making ratful squeak of hats,
Hats.
There is also a new sensuality in these poems and a richer, more elaborated sense of the complexities and nuances of erotic desire—a sign of how deeply schooled Crane had become in the agonies of heartbreak and lust:
Ah, God, the way your little finger moved
As you thrust a bare arm backward
And made play with your hair
And a comb, a silly gilt comb
Ah, God—that I should suffer
Because of the way a little finger moved.
Most memorable among these later poems are the title work of the second collection, “War Is Kind,” which seems to have been written in 1895, not long before the publication of Red Badge, and “A Man Adrift on a Slim Spar,” which was composed in England sometime in late 1897.* Although separated by more than two years, they are structured in nearly identical ways: each one five stanzas long, with the majority of the stanzas ending in a short, liturgical refrain of one sentence that consists of three one-syllable words, and as the poems build steadily from stanza to stanza, the end refrain grows stronger and more unsettling with each repetition. War and shipwreck. Those are the subjects of the two poems, and in them Crane delineates a stark, remorseless theology of human abandonment in a world without God.
Described by John Berryman as “one of the major lyrics of the century,” the war poem is also one of the most wrenching, bewildering, ironical, tragic, and complex pages in all of S.C.’s work:
Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
And the affrighted steed ran on alone,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment
Little souls who thirst for fight,
These men were born to drill and die
The unexplained glory flies above them
Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom——
A field where a thousand corpses lie.
Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,
Raged at his breast, gulped and died,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
Swift, blazing flag of the regiment
Eagle with crest of red and gold,
These men were born to drill and die
Point for them the virtue of slaughter
Make plain to them the excellence of killing
And a field where a thousand corpses lie.
Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
On the bright splendid shroud of your son,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
The lost poem pushes beyond the shared destinies of the men in “The Open Boat” and confines itself to the fate of one man clinging desperately to a piece of broken mast (the spar) from a ship that has already foundered and sunk. The man is about to drown, and all-powerful God, who could turn the ocean into a heap of dry ashes if He willed it, does not lift a finger for him. The moment when the man is about to go under is captured in the third line of the fourth stanza as the sky suddenly vanishes (“A reeling, drunken sky and no sky”)—language so compact and so severe that it resembles a blow from a tightly clenched fist. It is a terrifying poem, a poem of helplessness and panic that was written just as Crane was starting to realize that he, too, was in danger of going under, for one year after he had escaped drowning off the coast of Florida, he was drowning again on dry land in England.
A man adrift on a slim spar
A horizon smaller than the rim of a bottle
Tented waves rearing lashy dark points
The near whine of froth in circles.
God is cold.
The incessant raise and swing of the sea
And growl after growl of crest
The sinkings, green, seething, endless
The upheaval half-completed.
God is cold.
The seas are in the hollow of the Hand;
Oceans may be turned to a spray
Raining down through the stars
Because of a gesture of pity toward a babe.
Oceans may become grey ashes,
Die with a long moan and a roar
Amid the tumult of the fishes
And the cries of the ships
Because the Hand beckons the mice.
A horizon smaller than a doomed assassin’s cap
Inky, surging tumults
A reeling, drunken sky and no sky
A pale hand sliding from a polished spar.
God is cold.
A puff of a coat imprisoning air.
A face kissing the water-death
A weary slow sway of a lost hand
And the sea, the moving sea, the sea.
God is cold.
* * *
When Crane left for Cuba on April thirteenth, not only was he running away from his troubles in England, he was running toward his next adventure, which turned out to be the one that destroyed his health and ultimately killed him. It is difficult to know which impulse was stronger in him at that moment—the desire to run away or the desire to run toward—but it is certain that he had every intention of coming back. In spite of their debts and what J. C. Levenson calls their “prodigal hospitality,” Crane and Cora had become a solid, harmonious couple, so tightly connected after a year of living together that he was now dictating some of his work to her and her handwriting was becoming more and more indistinguishable from his. Knowing that they were dissatisfied with their house and wanted to remove themselves farther from London, Edward Garnett took it upon himself to steer them toward another house in Sussex (where they eventually wound up living), and both of them enthusiastically embraced the idea, so much so that S.C. talked about the house to his fellow journalists in Cuba as the place he would be going back to after the war was over.
The money squeeze on the one hand, habitual restlessness on the other—both factored into his decision to go—but there was more than that, something so difficult to define that it seems to resist being put into words. Hopeless was the word Conrad had used in his letter to Garnett in December, and in a letter written to Crane on February fifth, he went so far as to say, “It hurts me to think you are worried. It is bad for you and bad for your art.” This gets us a little closer to what I am struggling to pin down. Something was eating at Crane, some dark force had crept into him that was slowly tearing him apart, and chances are that he himself was not even aware of it, or had no words for it, or couldn’t bring himself to think about it, but whatever it was, it was pushing him toward a crisis, or perhaps had already thrown him into the middle of one. I don’t want to simplify matters and bluntly declare that he sensed he was dying, but given how he acted at the front in Cuba, where he seemed to be courting death by taking such outlandish risks as putting himself directly in the line of enemy fire, one suspects that he wanted to be gunned down in action and meet the death of a common foot soldier. A quick death—and not the slow death his damaged lungs were already preparing for him.
Perhaps.
In any case, once the idea took hold of him, nothing could stop him from going, and to his eternal regret, Conrad played an active part in scrounging up the funds to pay for the crossing to New York. As he dolefully recounts in his final memory piece about Crane:
The cloudy afternoon when we two went rushing all over London together, was for him the beginning of the end. The problem was to find £60 that day, before the sun set, before dinner, before the “six forty” train to Oxted, at once, that instant—lest peace be declared and the opportunity of seeing a war be missed. I had not £60 to lend him. Sixty shillings was nearer to my mark. We tried various offices but had no luck, or rather we had the usual luck of money hunting enterprises. The man was either gone out to see about a dog, or would take no interest in the Spanish-American war. In one place the man wanted to know what was the hurry? He would have liked to have forty-eight hours to think the matter over. As we came downstairs Crane’s white-faced excitement frightened me. Finally it occurred to me to take him to Messrs. William Blackwood & Sons’ London office. There he was received in a most friendly way. Presently I escorted him to Charing Cross where he took the train for home with the assurance that he would have the means to start “for the war” next day. That is the reason I can not to this day read his tale “The Price of the Harness” without a pang. It has done nothing more deadly than pay his debt to Messrs. Blackwood; yet now and then I feel as though that afternoon I had led him by the hand to his doom. But, indeed, I was only the blind agent of the fate that had him in her grip! Nothing could have held him back. He was ready to swim the ocean.
THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
1
Five days into S.C.’s crossing from Liverpool to New York on the steamship Germanic, two different versions of his latest story collection were published in the United States and England, The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure (Doubleday & McClure) and The Open Boat and Other Stories (Heinemann). In addition to the title story, both books contain “A Man and Some Others,” “One Dash—Horses,” “Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” “The Wise Men,” “Death and the Child,” and “The Five White Mice,” but these works form only the first part of the British edition—under the heading “Minor Conflicts”—which is followed by a second part (“Midnight Sketches”) that includes a number of pieces set in New York and Asbury Park: “An Experiment in Misery,” “The Men in the Storm,” “The Duel That Was Not Fought,” “An Ominous Baby,” “A Great Mistake,” “An Eloquence of Grief,” “The Auction,” “The Pace of Youth,” and “A Detail.” Whether in the long version or the short version, this gathering represents some of the finest work Crane had done or would ever do as a writer of stories, but the response from the press was no better or worse than the ones he had received for his other post–Red Badge books: a mixture of pro and con, of admiration and bafflement, of hearty slaps on the back and disdainful cold shoulders. The standard split decision for any writer worth his salt, and therefore not so bad, finally, but for a writer who happened to be splashing around in a pool of debt, it wouldn’t be good enough to drain out more than a few drops of water. No critical response captures Crane’s dilemma more acutely than an unsigned notice that appeared in the Athenaeum (London) in which the reviewer acknowledged that the stories “show evident signs of that extraordinary ability, amounting to genius, which distinguishes all the prose of Mr. Crane; but we doubt whether they will hit the taste of the public in this country, as they are too sombre and too generally concerned with persons of a somewhat uniform type of white savagery.”
This failure to “hit the taste of the public” was one of the reasons why Crane was in the middle of the Atlantic when the book was released, for by then even the “little hit” he had been counting on back in December would no longer have been enough to hold him in England. He needed money, and only a job as a correspondent in the approaching war could give it to him.
There was that, but there was also his conflicted state of mind when he set out for Cuba, which can be seen as an abrupt abandonment of Cora as well or, if not Cora herself, of the domesticity she represented, the settled, unbudging routine of work, home, and continual socializing. For all his efforts to adjust to these new circumstances, his first stab at conjugal life had lasted just ten months, and Cora would not be accompanying him as she had the previous spring when he bolted off to the war in Greece. The days of their joint adventuring had come to an end, and Imogene Carter (both the fact of her and the idea of her) had been laid permanently to rest. Instead, wife Cora would be staying put in England to grapple with the financial ruin she and her mouse had created and—in her mind if not in his—to keep the home fires burning. It was his decision, not hers, and she had no choice but to go along with it. To raise any objections would have put their unsanctified marriage at risk, perhaps even smashed it beyond hope of repair, and so she acquiesced in silence. Not without some legitimate worries about their future together, but also deeply worried about him. Two weeks before he left, she expressed those anxieties in a letter to their friend Scovel:
Dear Harry: Stephen is coming on the ship that carries this letter to America, as correspondent in the U.S. Spain row. I suppose you will see him as doubtless Key West will be the headquarters for newspaper men. We have thought it best for me to remain in England. I am writing to you to ask you and your good wife—if ye be in the same town, to look after him a little. He is rather seedy and I am anxious about him, for he does not care to look out for himself.… And if he should become ill I beg you to wire me.
That seediness and unwillingness to look out for himself, coupled with the threat of physical illness, would be borne out by Crane’s disheveled appearance and reckless behavior throughout the war, and, just as Cora had feared, he became so ill at one point that he had to be evacuated from Cuba and sent for treatment at the military hospital in Old Point Comfort, Virginia, which led to a further trip all the way to the Adirondacks to consult with a lung specialist who ran a sanatorium in Saranac Lake. Writing about Crane’s appearance on a dispatch boat during the early, pre-invasion period of the war, the novelist Frank Norris observed that
