Burning boy, p.84
Burning Boy, page 84
From Virginia, Crane went to New York to begin negotiating an agreement with the publisher Frederick A. Stokes for a book of stories about the Cuban war and to check in with his bosses at the World—who promptly fired him when he turned up at the office. In his 1933 article, Seitz claims that it was one of the members of his staff, financial director John Norris, who handed Crane his walking papers and refused to give him any money for expenses. According to Seitz, after Crane’s visit Norris emerged from his office “rubbing his hands gleefully. ‘I have just kissed your little friend Stephen Crane goodbye,’ he said with a full-face grin. ‘He came here asking for another advance. Don’t you think you have had enough of Mr. Pulitzer’s money without earning it? I asked. Oh, very well, he said, if that’s the way you look at it, by-by. So we’re rid of him.’”
One wonders how much of this account was true and whether Crane actually said what Norris-via-Seitz said he said. If the incident did play out according to this version, one could also ask why Crane took his dismissal so calmly and did not speak up in his own defense. Perhaps he already knew about their diminishing faith in his work and was half-expecting to be fired when he entered the building, or else, true to form, he did not want to cause a scene, which would have let them know how hurt he was by their contemptuous attitude toward him. It sounds as if he did no more than shrug. Call it the stiff upper lip, American-style—and then Adiós!
He could have gone back to England at that point, but he didn’t. No doubt because he didn’t want to or wasn’t ready to, and also because he didn’t have the money to pay for the crossing. Instead of borrowing the fare, he waved good-bye to his former employers at the World and walked over to the Journal building, where he signed on for another tour of duty with Hearst. Perhaps it made him feel a little better to switch his allegiance to Pulitzer’s archrival, but who knows? What the new job meant was more war and a chance to cover the Puerto Rican campaign, but before he went south again to begin his assignment, Crane took a long detour and traveled north to consult with the lung specialist Edward Livingston Trudeau in Saranac Lake.
Crane aboard the Three Friends off the coast of Cuba, 1898. (COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA)
His recent bout with malaria must have frightened him, and even though he seemed to have recovered and pretended to be well, it is almost certain that he knew he wasn’t well. Oddly enough, when Trudeau wrote to Cora in September about the visit, he seemed distinctly untroubled by his patient’s condition, whereas just one or two weeks after the checkup, Michelson would write that Crane was “hollow-cheeked,” “marked by ill health,” and that his body resembled “a frayed white ribbon.” Even earlier than that (before the malaria), in a number of photographs taken aboard the Three Friends, Crane had been looking unwell, slovenly (as per Frank Norris’s description), and disturbingly unlike himself. Barefoot, shaggy-haired, dressed in rumpled white pajama-clothes, and sporting a thick, drooping mustache, he comes across as a demented beachcomber or, perhaps, as a self-anointed prophet who has just spent forty days fasting in the desert, where he was struck by a bolt of lightning on the morning of the first day. Now that he had been through the shakes and deliriums of tropical fever, he must have looked even worse, and yet Dr. Trudeau calmly writes:
Dear madam
Your husband had a slight evidence of activity in the trouble of his lungs when he came back here this summer but it was not serious and he has improved steadily I understand since he came. I have only examined him once but he looked very well and told me he was feeling much better last time I saw him.
Among other things, this awkwardly written note tells us that Crane had come to see Trudeau on an earlier visit or visits, and improved steadily since he came suggests that sometime after the most recent consultation, Crane had contacted the doctor to report that he was feeling better—which might have been true but probably wasn’t. Not many people lie to their doctor, at least not people who want to get well, but it would not have been beyond Crane to lie in this circumstance, for either in his lost letter to Trudeau or when they were talking to each other face-to-face, he must have asked the doctor to write to Cora and, when he did, to couch his language in the most unalarming terms possible. Otherwise, why would Trudeau have written to her, and how could he have known where to send the letter if Crane hadn’t given him the address? Some have argued that Cora must have written to the doctor first and that this letter was his reply, but she wouldn’t have contacted Trudeau unless Crane had already told her he had been to Saranac Lake—which amounts to more or less the same thing, since Crane would have been the instigator of the correspondence whether there was one letter or two. Above all, he wanted to protect Cora from the truth about his lungs, which was something he would continue to do even after he returned to England, and for now, as she waited for him on the other side of the ocean, the last thing he wanted was to compound her anxieties about his absence with further anxieties about his health.
* * *
Crane left New York for Pensacola, Florida, on July twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth. Spanish forces in the Puerto Rican city of Ponce surrendered to the Americans on the twenty-eighth, and promptly on the twenty-ninth Crane, Michelson, and other correspondents boarded a tug chartered by the Journal and set out for Puerto Rico. It was on that boat that Michelson made his observations about Crane’s physical condition and general state of mind (“destitute of small talk, critical if not fastidious”), but there are other pertinent details about the things Crane said and did, as well as his interactions with the others on the boat (everyone crammed together for a week), and then, after they reached shore and landed, how he behaved in Ponce and elsewhere. Without Michelson’s text, which was published as the introduction to the twelfth and final book in the first multivolume edition of Crane’s work (1925–27), much of what happened during this period would be missing from the story.
It was a slow, tedious journey, according to Michelson, with “few thrills,” but the water was often choppy, even rough, and most of the men on board suffered from violent attacks of seasickness. As he had shown on the Commodore, however, “Crane never felt a qualm.” Weak lungs, yes, but a sturdy gut, and when he put his mind to it, he was still the master of the spontaneous quip. Once, when an American cruiser came close to the tug and then sharply—and indignantly—veered off after learning the nature of its business, Crane said, “Like a fat dowager duchess who had been asked by a scrubwoman where she had bought her hat.” On another rough day at sea, as men were throwing up over the railing, Crane pointed out to Michelson “the convulsive jerk of their shoulders” and said that “men died with just such a spasm.… It was not lack of sympathy, or callousness,” Michelson adds, “It was simply that motion-picture mind of his registering impressions. It was an instinct, stronger than love, pity, or fear.”
These last sentences confirm why Michelson is such a valuable witness. Not just the “motion-picture mind” (a point that seems so clear in retrospect but which no one could understand during Crane’s lifetime) but also the word “instinct,” that is, Crane’s compulsion to look at things objectively and without prejudice, to discard everyone else’s opinion about the “deep bluish tint which is so widely condemned when it is put into pictures” and trust what his own eyes were seeing.
On another day, when asked by an American cruiser that was being threatened by a Spanish destroyer to run interference by making a hard turn toward the shore, the tug carried out the operation after Crane goaded the captain into doing it. Michelson: “The chaperon of our war party went to the pilot-house to learn the reason for the turn. There he found Stephen baiting the captain to run in close. Asked why he was doing it, the seaman answered fervently: “You don’t think I’m going to let this damned frayed tholepin think he’s got more guts than me, do you?”
As defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, a tholepin is “a wooden peg set in pairs in the gunwale of a boat to serve as an oarlock.” In other words, the captain was comparing Crane to a wooden peg, and a frayed one at that, but soon enough, as often happens when entertainments are scarce and everyone is bored, the word stuck. It seems that Crane had mentioned that his wife was negotiating new living arrangements for them at Brede Place in Sussex, a large manor house that dated back to the fourteenth century, and suddenly he became Lord Tholepin, “a liverish British squire, with an East Indian background, and the ancestral mansion was christened Mango Chutney.” Michelson contends that Crane “had more fun out of it than anybody else,” although one wonders if he had any choice but to play along in those confined circumstances. In any case, the joke eventually wore thin and that was the end of it, but what this microscopic, ephemeral story tells us is that Crane was intending to go back to Cora. At least then he was, and if at other times he wasn’t, the certainty displayed here as opposed to the doubt displayed at other moments only proves how torn he was about the life he wanted for himself after the war. Assuming, of course, that he would still be alive then and have something to look forward to.
Once they arrived at Ponce and went ashore, Crane did his usual vanishing act, and instead of joining the other correspondents on their excursions to the hotels and cafés, he began hanging out with “the wastrels of Ponce—drunkards, drabs, and tin-horn gamblers. They did not know a word of his language nor he a word of theirs. Moreover, this was a conquered city and he was one of the invaders. That made no difference. He was accepted into the easy brotherhood.”
On the other hand, when called upon to appear in more elegant surroundings, Crane proved himself to be what Michelson terms a “social bankrupt.”
The Army and Navy officers made a great deal of the literary lights. Richard Harding Davis was always the star of their parties … but they were intensely curious about Crane. It was hard to get him to the dinners. Maybe he resented the contrast between himself and Davis—the latter always a full-page illustration by Gibson of a war correspondent, immaculate in a tailored uniform, his deep chest striated with service ribbons. In these gatherings, Davis glittered not only by his accoutrements but by his accomplishments. He would borrow a banjo and to its accompaniment sing “Mandalay” and other ballads, and between times carry his full share of the burden of conversation, always ready, always interesting, while Stephen, in his old campaign clothes, sat tongue-tied.
Just one month before those nights in Ponce, Crane had risked his neck to help Davis in a time of trouble, and just one month after, Davis would heap extravagant praise on the high quality of S.C.’s reportage from Cuba. But the two men never got along, perhaps because each one represented an idea of manhood so different from the other that they could never establish a middle ground between them. Crane sulked in silence as Davis hogged the attention of the crowd, no doubt wondering if the pompous oaf with the medals on his chest had any idea how ridiculous he was. The dandified hero was more tolerant, but at best he saw his little colleague as a brilliant, benighted screwup, admirable in his way, perhaps, but somehow pitiable. He probably didn’t know that the silent one could play the banjo just as well as he could and had a decent tenor voice.
Puerto Rico was the aftermath, a short nineteen-day campaign during which the American troops encountered little or no resistance. The Puerto Ricans seemed more than glad to be rid of the Spanish and were cautiously hopeful that life would be better for them under the protection of the United States. The jury is still out on whether that hope was warranted, but at the time the island was in a festive mood, and so quickly did town after town surrender to the Yankee forces that Crane himself was responsible for the capture of one of them.
As usual, there are two competing versions of the story. In the first one, Crane simply walked into Juana Díaz one morning, and after he was given a warm welcome by the population, he turned his unexpected ascension to power into a high-spirited lark: Puck the prankster in all his quick-thinking, improvisatory dazzle. Gathering the men of the town into the central square, he arbitrarily divided them into two categories: “suspects” and “good fellows.” The suspects were sent home, and then he appointed the good fellows as his hosts and bodyguards. “A frenzied carnival of rejoicing” followed, and the next morning, when an American colonel arrived with a regiment of eight hundred men, he told Crane that he was glad a journalist would be there to watch them take this town. “‘This town!’ said Crane in polite embarrassment. ‘I’m really very sorry, Colonel, but I took this town before breakfast yesterday morning!’”
So says Richard Harding Davis, who was not in Juana Díaz and reportedly heard the story from Crane himself, but Michelson, who was there and saw what happened, gives a more complex and somewhat more subdued version of the caper. In his account, he and Crane and “a flock of correspondents” were looking for a place to eat breakfast. The new policy was that inns were supposed to serve food to “hungry officers” before anyone else, but when they arrived at Juana Díaz, there were no officers. “Then came Stephen Crane’s inspiration. He rode ahead and announced that the American governor of Porto Rico was on his way and ordered breakfast for His Excellency and Staff. The most imposing member of the party, fortunately in immaculate whites, took the part of governor. He gave instructions to advise anybody who appeared that he did not wish to be disturbed during the meal. The preposterous strategy worked.” When a brigadier general showed up a bit later and asked what was going on, the flustered Crane managed to lie his way out of it. “‘Governor?’ he said. ‘Oh, I guess the people here heard us call Jack Mumford governor, he looks so much like one. There’s nobody here but a bunch of newspaper correspondents.’”
Michelson’s version is more plausible, but in each one the conquest of Juana Díaz shows Crane at his most boyish, his most playful, his most exuberantly silly. If he had acted that way more often in Puerto Rico, one could conclude that he was fully recovered from his tropical fever scare and the visit to the Adirondacks, but his behavior during the weeks he spent there was remarkably inconsistent. Withdrawn and quiet on the tug, withdrawn and quiet at the military dinners in Ponce, a Peter Pan extrovert in Juana Díaz, and then, as the correspondents prepared to leave the island, the tearful parting from his beloved horse (as noted here), which was nothing if not a blubbering surge of sentimental excess. Not stable, then. Not steady. A mass of different moods oscillating from low to high and down to low again, and if he wasn’t in any immediate danger of landing in crack-up territory, he was hovering around the outskirts, and even now, when the fighting and the war were over, the nightmares he had witnessed in Cuba continued to press in on him, and he still wasn’t prepared to return to England. Instead, sometime during the third week of August, under the false pretense that he was a commercial tobacco buyer, he slipped into Havana without authorization and remained there, for reasons both obscure and more obscure, until the last week of December.
4
Going back to April, back to England, and back to the one who was left behind …
The household in Oxted now had three people in it, one half-empty bed, and three dogs. For company, Cora had the enigmatic Charlotte Ruedy (who called herself Mrs., not Miss, and about whom almost nothing is known); for help, she had the dutiful, ever-obliging Adoni Ptolemy; and beyond the perimeters of Ravensbrook, she had the moral support of Harold Frederic, Kate Lyon, Robert Barr, and Conrad, who didn’t see her often but kept in touch by mail, sending her at least seven letters during Crane’s absence, all of them notable for their warmth and anxious concern about her welfare. Toward the end of the year, when it became a question of finding the money to get Crane back to England, Conrad actively explored a number of possible solutions and at one point (being moneyless himself) offered to put up his own work as collateral for a potential loan. A good friend. As were the others, and for the first three or four months, all was relatively calm. She was short of funds and living on credit, of course, but out-and-out panic would not set in until later.
She didn’t mope, and she didn’t feel sorry for herself, and she refused to give in to the threat of loneliness. Just days after Crane’s departure, she accepted an invitation from the Frederics to join them and their three young children for a return visit to the house in Ahakista on the southern coast of Ireland. As Conrad put it in a letter to her from April nineteenth:
We imagine how lonely you must have felt after Stephen’s departure. The dear fellow wired me from Queenstown, just before going aboard I suppose. Jess is very concerned about you and wishes me to ask you to drop her a line on your arrival in Ireland. I think your going there would be a good thing as solitude after separation is sometimes very hard to bear.
We thought of asking you to come here at once but on receiving Stephen’s wire I imagined you were all in Ireland already. However you will be more entertained and more comfortable at the Frederic’s for a time and on your return to England I hope you will have the will and the courage to undertake the risky experiment of coming to us with Mrs. Ruedy. Moreover I fancy Stephen’s absence won’t be very prolonged and we may have the felicity of seeing you all here together. I trust you will let me know how he fares whenever you hear from him. He is not very likely to write to anyone else—if I know the man.
After spending two or three weeks with the Frederics, Cora returned to her house in Oxted and began plotting an escape from the house, from Oxted, and from all the encumbrances that had dogged her life with Crane since they had settled in England. Neither one of them had ever been happy with their suburban villa, and for some time they had been talking about moving elsewhere. A place in the country, a place more distant from London, a quiet refuge where they would be free from the continual harassment of unwanted visitors and Crane could disappear into his work. Back in March, their neighbor Garnett had told them about a house owned by a friend in Sussex, and as the critic remembered it years afterward, Crane had been so enthralled by the description of the ancient structure, “noble and gray with the passage of five hundred years,” that he immediately jumped on the idea of becoming the tenant of Brede Place. With no other pressing obligations to distract her after she returned from the Irish coast, Cora buckled down to the business of making it happen.
