Burning boy, p.87
Burning Boy, page 87
He was not the same after the incident, was more reticent and less regular in his habit of joining us every morning.…
[Eventually,] he went into complete retirement.
* * *
A high fever, a badly infected right hand (his writing hand), and all the attendant miseries visited upon an already battered, weakened body. Not to mention the low spirits that would have followed from those things, all because that drunken fool had been allowed to attend the dance, but the “complete retirement” Parker refers to in the last sentence was not caused by those personal setbacks alone. There were practical reasons as well, and Crane went into hiding only after he had been informed that the Journal had pulled the plug on his expense account, a blow that turned out to be no less damaging than the knife wound in his hand.
He had come to Havana to work his way out of debt, and now he had incurred even more debts because the paper was refusing to cover his bill at the Hotel Pasaje, where he had been living for the past three weeks. It was an expensive place, one of the best hotels in Havana, and suddenly he was responsible for settling his account with money he did not have. He was still working for the Journal, but he was no longer on the payroll, and they were not willing to give him more than twenty dollars per article, a rock-bottom fee that was probably held back from him and deducted from what he owed the Pasaje—reducing the bill by such small increments that he must have felt he would be trapped there forever. “I positively cannot afford to write for twenty dollars a column,” he complained in a letter to Reynolds, and three letters after that, on his twenty-seventh birthday: “I am working like a dog. When—oh, when—am I to have some money? If you could only witness my poverty!”
Sometime between the sixth and the eighth of September, he moved into a boardinghouse owned by Mary Horan, an Irish transplant who had been living in Havana for years. Thirteen months later, Crane would finish the last of his Cuban war stories, “This Majestic Lie,” in which a character modeled on his landlady is described as “born in Ireland, bred in New York, fifteen years married to a Spanish captain, and now a widow, keeping Cuban lodgers who had no money with which to pay her.” Perhaps this is an accurate account of Mary Horan’s story, perhaps it isn’t, but one way or the other, Crane lived in her house for more than three months, perhaps as her only boarder, perhaps not, and once his wound healed and he was able to hold a pen in his right hand again, he plunged in and started working “like a dog” as Mary Horan watched over him and made sure he remembered to eat.
Helen R. Crane, who heard about those months directly from her uncle when he stopped in New York on his way back to England, offers some interesting details about Mrs. Horan’s approach to food and exercise:
Mary did not approve of his long hours of work, and she used to go in and hover over him with a great tray of food. “I don’t want to eat, please go away.” “Go away, my eye, you’re goin’ to eat this if I have to feed it to you spoon by spoon!” And Stephen ate. It was she who made him go for a walk every night about eleven. She came into his room, pulled the chair out from under him and drove him bodily into the street.
So Crane holed up at Mary Horan’s boardinghouse and he worked … and then he worked. Article after article for the next-to-nothing twenty dollars a shot, an outrush of new poems, and four short stories that were dispatched to Reynolds the moment they were finished. All of the stories are good, but the second one, “The Price of the Harness,” which was sent off on September twenty-seventh (the same day Robert Barr wrote to Cora and vented his disgust with the silent one in Havana), is a masterpiece, a story that Conrad judged to be “magnificent” and prompted him to tell Cora, “He is maturing. He is expanding. There is more breath and more substance.… It is Stephen all himself—and a little more. It is the very truth of art.”
In the less exalted realm of money, “The Price of the Harness” also squared Crane’s debt with Blackwood’s for the sixty-pound loan they had given him in April—a positive outcome for the time being, but in retrospect it was that terrible exchange between art and life that so haunted Conrad whenever he thought about the story in the years between Crane’s death and his own: the pact to return the money by pulling words out of a body that had been ruined by the quest to find those words.
The title refers to the sacrifices made by the soldiers in the regular army, “the price,” as Crane told Reynolds in a subsequent letter, “the men paid for wearing the military harness, Uncle Sam’s military harness; and they paid blood, hunger and fever.” Building on the remarks he had made about his imaginary, prototypical career soldier presented in his last article for the World, “Regulars Get No Glory,” Crane brings his Private Jimmie Nolan to life along with three other privates, Jack Martin, Billie Grierson, and Ike Watkins, who all participate in the charge on the fortifications of San Juan, just outside Santiago. One of them will be shot in the arm, another will contract yellow fever, and two of them will be killed.
The story advances with a steady, implacable force over seventeen densely packed pages, one blunt sentence leading to the next and unfolding in a narrative that follows the four protagonists while they go about their business as common foot soldiers, digging a road up a tangled hillside, going without rations on the first night, and ultimately going into battle, all recounted with Crane’s customary flair for visual and sensory details, but matter-of-factly, in a tone devoid of linguistic flourish or probing inner reflection. The men are part of a machine, and they understand their roles without questioning the dangers that lie in front of them, and once the fighting begins, “to the prut of the magazine rifles was added the under-chorus of the clicking mechanism, steady and swift as if the hand of one operator was controlling it all. It reminds one always of a loom, a great grand steel loom, clinking, clanking, plunking, plinking, to weave a woof of thin red threads, the cloth of death.” The men are prepared for this, “and all the long training at the rifle ranges, all the pride of the marksman which had been so long alive in them, made them forget for the time everything but shooting. They were as deliberate and exact as so many watchmakers.”
Nolan is there and happy to be there, proud to be a part of it because the regiment and the army are “his life” and he feels awed by the courage of his fellow soldiers.
They were halfway up the beautiful sylvan slope; there was no enemy to be seen, and yet the landscape rained bullets. Somebody punched him violently in the stomach. He thought dully to lie down and rest, but instead he fell with a crash.
The sparse line of men in blue shirts and dirty slouch hats swept on up the hill. He decided to shut his eyes for a moment because he felt very dreamy and peaceful. It seemed only a minute before he heard a voice say, “There he is.” Grierson and Watkins had come to look for him. He searched their faces.…
“Nolan,” said Grierson clumsily, “do you know me?”
The man on the ground smiled softly. “Of course I know you, you chowder-faced monkey. Why wouldn’t I know you?”
Nolan’s friends ask him where he was hit, and although he isn’t entirely sure, he points to his stomach, insisting that “it ain’t much,” but when Grierson and Watkins lift his shirt, they understand that he has been mortally wounded.
Then follows one of the most devastating conversations in any of Crane’s stories, a wrenching passage that somehow manages to convey both the horror and banality of death at the same time and in the same unwavering key. Immersed as I have been in Crane’s writing over the past few years, it is this moment that comes to me first whenever I ask myself what it is about his work that draws me to it and why I find it so compelling:
“Does it hurt, Jimmie?” said Grierson, hoarsely.
“No,” said Nolan, “it don’t hurt any, but I feel sort of dead-to-the-world and numb all over. I don’t think it’s very bad.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” said Watkins.
“What I need is a drink,” said Nolan, grinning at them. “I’m chilly—lyin’ on this damp ground.”
“It ain’t very damp, Jimmie,” said Grierson.
“Well, it is damp,” said Nolan, with sudden irritability. “I can feel it. I’m wet. I tell you—wet through—just from lyin’ here.”
They answered hastily. “Yes, that’s so, Jimmie. It is damp. That’s so.”
“Just put your hand under my back and see how wet the ground is,” he said.
“No,” they answered. “That’s all right, Jimmie. We know it’s wet.”
“Well, put your hand under and see,” he cried, stubbornly.
“Oh, never mind, Jimmie.”
“No,” he said in a temper. “See for yourself.” Grierson seemed to be afraid of Nolan’s agitation, and so he slipped a hand under the prostrate man, and presently withdrew it covered with blood. “Yes,” he said, hiding his hand carefully from Nolan’s eyes, “you were right, Jimmie.”
“Of course I was,” said Nolan, contentedly closing his eyes. “This hillside holds water like a swamp.” After a moment he said: “Guess I ought to know. I’m flat here on it, and you fellers are standing up.”
He did not know he was dying. He thought he was holding an argument on the condition of the turf.
The fifth chapter ends there, and when the final chapter begins, there has been a small temporal jump. “Cover his face,” Grierson says to Watkins, but the problem is what to cover it with. They eventually decide on Nolan’s hat, and after Grierson performs that grim task, neither one of them knows what to do next, although they both feel they should do something. “Finally Watkins said in a broken voice, ‘Aw, it’s a damn shame.’ They moved slowly off to the firing line.”
A white space follows, after which Crane launches directly into the closing scene, which takes place in a fever tent for the wounded and ill. Martin, one of the original quartet of protagonists, who has already been shot at an earlier point in the story, is one of the patients in that improvised hospital, where “a heavy odor of sickness and medicine hung in the air” and “the occasional … twisting of a body under a blanket was terrifying, as if dead men were moving in their graves under the sod.” The men are all lying on their backs, languishing in the throes of fever, but some faint, disembodied voices are nevertheless engaged in a sort of conversation, and that is how Martin and Grierson of the Twenty-ninth Infantry learn that they both happen to be there at the same time. Grierson says:
“What? Jack, is that you?”
“It’s a part of me.… Who are you?”
“Grierson, you fat-head. I thought you were wounded.”
There was the noise of a man gulping a great drink of water, and at its conclusion Martin said, “I am.”
“Well, what you doin’ in the fever place, then?”
Martin replied with drowsy impatience, “Got the fever too.”
“Gee!” said Grierson.
Thereafter there was silence in the fever tent save for the noises made by a man over in a corner, a kind of man always found in an American crowd, a heroic, implacable comedian and patriot, of a humor that has bitterness and ferocity and love in it, and he was wringing from the situation a grim meaning by singing the Star-Spangled Banner with all the ardor which could be procured from his fever-stricken body.
“Billie,” called Martin in a low voice, “where’s Jimmie Nolan?”
“He’s dead,” said Grierson.
A triangle of raw gold light shone on a side of the tent. Somewhere in the valley an engine’s bell was ringing, and it sounded of peace and home as if it hung on a cow’s neck.
“An’ where’s Ike Watkins?”
“Well, he ain’t dead, but he got shot through the lungs. They say he ain’t got much show.”
Through the clouded odors of sickness and medicine rang the dauntless voice of the man in the corner:
“… Long may it wave…”
* * *
Bitterness, ferocity, and love.
It is, as Conrad rightly observed, magnificent, and when Crane sent the story to Reynolds, he could scarcely contain his exuberance over what he had done. “Now this is It,” he wrote. “If you dont touch big money for it I wonder!”
What was not touching big money were the articles he was writing for the Journal, but he ground them out as persistently as he could, producing a blend of reportage and commentary that resembles what we would now call op-ed columns, most of them couched in the breezy language of a jaded cosmopolitan. Not dull, precisely, but nothing to get worked up about either, except for two of them, which stand out sharply from the others. While Crane seems to have spent most of his time at Mary Horan’s house wallowing in a dark emotional hole, “How They Court in Cuba” must have been written on one of his rare good days. It is a bright little comic treatise on the elaborate courtship rituals in a repressive, highly regulated society that puts up so many obstacles to marriage that it is a wonder any children ever manage to get born. “It is all barbed wire entanglements,” Crane writes, and the process can drag on for so long, often stretching out over three or six or even eight years, that it generates “all the fiery excitement of being cashier in a shoe store.” Still, he concludes, there is little point in worrying about any of this, for “men seek the women they love, and find them, and women wait for the men they love, and the men come, and all the circumlocution and bulwarks and clever football interference and trouble and delay and protracted agony and duennas count for nothing, count for nothing against the tides of human life, which are in Cuba or Omaha controlled by the same moon.”
More in keeping with his general frame of mind, there is the somber, heartfelt “How They Leave Cuba,” which discusses the evacuation of the Spanish from the city within the context of a moving scene Crane witnessed when he and a friend walked around the deck of a departing ship filled with “sick soldiers, officers, Spanish families, even some priests—all people who, by long odds, would never again set their eyes on the island of Cuba.” Crane and his companion climb into a boat that will take them back to shore, and in the boat next to theirs they see a sobbing woman with a four-year-old boy in her arms. “Her eyes were fastened upon the deck of the ship, where stood an officer in the uniform of a Spanish captain of infantry. He was making no sign. He simply stood immovable, staring at the boat. Sometimes men express great emotion by merely standing still for a long time. It seemed as if he was never again going to move a muscle.”
As for the person sobbing in the boat: “She was not a pretty woman and she was—old.” Repellent as the idea might be to him (Crane uses the word “barbarity”), he admits that if she had been beautiful, there might have been “some consolation at least. But this to her was the end, the end of a successful love,” and the man who is leaving her and going back to Spain “[is] probably her only chance at happiness.”
Our attention is then directed to the woman’s boatman, who is growing impatient and wants to get back to round up other fares. But Crane doesn’t begin the paragraph by addressing the man’s intentions. Rather, in one of the most improbable and audacious verbal surprises anywhere in the three thousand one hundred pages of his collected works, he writes: “The woman’s boatman had a face like a floor.” The reader necessarily will be stunned for a moment, but that is what Crane has written: “The woman’s boatman had a face like a floor.” And then the reader will read the sentence again, then read the sentences that follow it about the boatman’s intentions and understand that a floor is a blank, a broad, expressionless blank, an impervious slab of wood or stone indifferent to anything that might happen to it and that the boatman’s face is a floor because he doesn’t give a damn about the woman’s suffering. He spits into the water and thinks: Serves her right for taking up with a Spaniard. But Crane counters with his own thought: “The woman’s heart was broken. That is the point. And that is not yet the worst of it. There is going to be a lot of it: such a hideous lot of it!” And then, in the final sentence of the piece: “But, after all—and after all—and again after all, it is human agony and human agony is not pleasant.”
For once, Crane seems overwrought, and in that sudden burst of compassion for the sobbing woman, he exposes an ache that had been building within him for some time. We know about his money problems and the problem of his worsening health, but there seems to have been another problem that was tormenting him during his months in Havana as well, something connected to his love life that had embittered him and left him on the verge of hopelessness. Parker mentions a “personal shock” Crane received toward the end of August or the beginning of September when he “found” a woman he had known “elsewhere in the world,” the start of an affair or a potential affair that burned out when he discovered “a photograph of a handsome Cuban” on her mantel. This is extremely vague. If there was such a woman, she has never been identified, and given that Parker was writing forty-two years after the fact, it could be that he scrambled the photo incident with the photos exchanged by the two lovers in “The Clan of No-Name,” a long story S.C. finished in October, or else with yet another photo that appears in one of the anguished, mostly terrible love poems Crane wrote in Havana when the narrator sees a picture of the woman he loves in another man’s bedroom.
Whether Parker was right or wrong, there is no question that Crane was preoccupied by the deceits and manipulations of love in the work he was writing then. Margharita, the resplendent beauty in “The Clan of No-Name,” is a two-timing gold digger who bluffs her way into a lucrative marriage—S.C.’s first femme fatale in all her seductive, irresistible glory—and, if nothing else, the bad poems attest to the fact that Crane was brooding about some unspecified love drama and suffering greatly because of it. The photograph shows up in the third stanza of “Love forgive me if I wish you grief”:
