Burning boy, p.88
Burning Boy, page 88
He had your picture in his room
A scurvy traitor picture
And he smiled
—Merely a fat complacence
Of men who know fine women—
And thus I divided with him
A part of my love.
Again and again, Crane comes back to the obsessive theme of betrayal, of being pushed out by another man and having to share his love with a contemptible rival.
Tell me why, behind thee,
I see always the shadow of another lover?
Is it real
Or is this the thrice-damned memory of a better happiness?
Plague on him if he be dead
Plague on him if he be alive
A swinish numskull
To intrude his shade
Always between me and my peace.
It could be that Cora’s past life was more of a problem for him than he had realized earlier—her affairs with other men, her two marriages, and the distasteful fact that she was still married to someone else, and now, as he pondered their own phantom marriage, perhaps the shadowy figure of ex-captain Stewart had turned into a source of humiliation for him, as this stanza from the dreadful “Intrigue” seems to suggest:
Thou art my love
And thou art the ashes of other men’s love
And I bury my face in these ashes
And I love them
Woe is me.
Then again, it could be that Cora was only a part of it, just one woman among several from his life who have been joined together to form a single imaginary woman: the embodiment of all the torments he had endured over the years in the cause of love. Had he ever become entangled with anyone as duplicitous as the scheming beauty in “The Clan of No-Name”? Impossible to know, but for all his efforts to channel his feelings into those cryptic, clunky lines of self-pitying complaint, the best bit of verse he wrote in Havana was the energetic little stanza that precedes “Clan.” Call it an epigraph, call it a prologue, it has both bite and music and sets the tone of the story that follows.
Unwind my riddle.
Cruel as hawks the hours fly,
Wounded men seldom come home to die,
The hard waves see an arm flung high,
Scorn hits strong because of a lie,
Yet there exists a mystic tie.
Unwind my riddle.
The riddle will never be unwound, nor will we ever know the exact nature of the crisis that kept Crane anchored in Havana for so long. There is no doubt that he produced some exceptional work while he was there, but he also wrote some uncommonly bad work, poems so far beneath his standard that one can only assume they never would have been written if he hadn’t been trapped in a dark place within himself and slowly coming undone. He didn’t quite get there, but never had he come so close to touching bottom.
* * *
General Wade tracked down Crane by talking to a number of American journalists posted in Havana, and his written report on October nineteenth confirmed that the missing man had “not been out of the city. After these inquiries, Mr. Crane called and expressed regret at having caused so much trouble. I do not know his business or why he had not corresponded with his family.”
Nor did anyone else, not even the people who were in direct contact with him, as was the second eyewitness of his curious sojourn in Havana, Otto Carmichael, a correspondent for the Minneapolis Times. General Wade had asked him to deliver a message to Crane that a telegram had arrived for him from London, and when Carmichael found S.C. sitting in a café, he passed on the message. “Thanks,” Crane said, and then promptly seemed to forget all about it. The next day, the general told Carmichael that a second telegram had arrived asking if the first one had been delivered, so the man from Minneapolis went back to the café, found Crane sitting in the same spot, and passed on the second message. “Say,” answered the distracted S.C., “didn’t you tell me something about a cablegram yesterday?” Yes, Carmichael said, and now he was back because another one had arrived asking if the first one had been delivered. “Yes, I see,” Crane answered. “Using the government to find me. Anyway, I’m much obliged.” “And again,” Carmichael writes, “he forgot all about it.” Time passed, and after they had become better acquainted, Carmichael told him that General Wade still had the telegram, but Crane shrugged it off, pretending that it was probably a bill of some sort. Not likely, but why would he tell Carmichael that he had buried himself in Havana and didn’t want to be found, not even by Cora?
Carmichael’s piece covers just three pages, but it gives the fullest picture of Crane during those months, and nearly every one of his remarks is pertinent, forthright, and stinging in its honesty. The fact that he published it in June 1900, only ten days after Crane’s death, means that Crane was still a vivid presence for him—still alive, as it were, still breathing.
On his overall impression of the man (which sounds oddly similar to what Crane’s friends from Syracuse saw in him when he was not yet twenty):
Stephen Crane to a certainty was a Bohemian. He was absolutely worthless except for what he did. The city editor of a modern newspaper would not have had him around the city room for a week. He was irresponsible and unmanageable. There was nothing vicious about him or even reckless; he was serenely indifferent; trifles would change him and big things would not stop him; fancy would hold him to a place and money would not move him from it.
On Crane’s reputation:
I have heard many army officers say he was the bravest man they ever saw. He apparently did not think of danger. Death to him was nothing more than the next breath, or the next breakfast or sleep. Bullets were nothing to him, moving or in cartridges, except something to make copy about. This was not affected. It was the quality of the fellow. To see others suffer tore his tender heart. He was almost girlish in his sympathies. But it apparently did not bother him to be hungry himself or in pain. He never grumbled about taking his share.…
Crane had seen all kinds of fighting. It had a fascination for him. Danger was his dissipation. He was really grieved when he learned he had left a café just a few minutes before a noisy shooting scrape.
On his habits:
He did nothing with any regularity. He ate and slept when he could no longer do without these necessary comforts.… When I saw him he was doing 600 words a day. This was the only thing he did with any regularity. He was very particular about his work. He wrote somewhat slowly and was whimsical about words. He would spend a long time in trying to find what suited him. Inasmuch as he had no dictionary or books of reference, his search for words and information consisted in chewing his pencil and waiting until they came to him.
On his health:
A strong man could not help feeling sorry for Crane. He seemed on the verge of collapse for lack of strength. His arms were as thin as one who had been ill for a long time. In a dim light Crane’s face was handsome to the point of being exquisitely beautiful. In the full light his face had a sick and miserable look. His drawn lips, his yellowish, haggard face, his tired eyes and generally wornout appearance combined to make a picture not particularly attractive. But he was so simple and genuine that one soon forgot all about these and could see the wan, half-pleading smile on his frank, boyish face. This little smile went for everything with Crane. It was his thanks for a light, his approval of an act, his delight over a story, his acknowledgement of distress, his pity for weakness. In fact, that sensitive little smile was always flitting about his face.…
To take care of his health never occurred to him. He had the Cuban fashion of drinking light drinks and coffee, but he did not indulge to excess in alcohol. This was somewhat remarkable at a time and place of excessive drinking. This was two years ago and his health then was wretched. There was no chance for him to live unless he mended his ways. It was nothing more than thoughtlessness. He simply refused to think about himself.
* * *
In September, Crane watched the Spanish authorities disinter the bones of Christopher Columbus from their grave in Havana. The man who had discovered the New World was now being expelled from the island he had conquered, and the bits of him that were left would be carried back across the ocean and reburied in Seville. More than just an acknowledgment of Spain’s defeat in the war with the United States, it marked the end of a four-hundred-year chapter in world history. When the bones finally set sail for Europe on December twentieth, the American Century began.
By then, Crane was already packing his bags and preparing to leave Havana. He had hung on in Limboville for four months, but after flopping back and forth about what he wanted to do next—sending a reassuring cablegram to Cora on October ninth that all was well, then writing to Reynolds a couple of weeks later to announce that he hoped to syndicate his columns and would possibly be staying in Havana throughout the winter—he gave up, gave in, or gave out and decided to call it quits.
He left on Christmas Eve and landed in New York at five A.M. on December twenty-eighth. It would be his last visit to the city, and that afternoon, on a brief visit to McClure’s offices, he ran into Hamlin Garland for the last time. That night, Garland wrote in his journal:
At McClure’s I met Stephen Crane the wonderful boy whose early work I saw and advocated in 1891–2. He is just returned from Havana, and looked dingy and soaked with nicotine but appeared mentally alert and as full of odd turns of thought as ever. He strikes me now as he did in the early days as unwholesome physically—not a man of long life. He is now unusually careless in his dress and has acquired a slight English accent in a few of his words—He was not overwhelmed with joy to see me.
He also saw his old friend Louis Senger, who later wrote, “He was sick and joked mirthlessly that they had not got him yet,” as well as his brother Edmund and niece Helen R.—also for the last time—and made a last visit to Howells. From Howells to Cora on July 22, 1900:
He came to see me last just before he sailed to England the last time, and then he showed the restlessness of the malarial fever that was preying on him; he spoke of having got it in Cuba. But even then … I felt his rare quality. I do not think America has produced a more distinctive and vital talent.
Wounded men seldom come home to die, but the wounded Crane was going back to England, and if that wasn’t precisely his home, it was the next best thing to it—the one place in the world where he would be welcomed in without having to explain himself. As it happened, he left New York aboard the Manitou on New Year’s Eve 1898, two years to the day since he had set foot on the doomed Commodore. This time, the boat did not sink.
A BRUTAL EXTINCTION
1
He touched land at Gravesend on January eleventh, and as he marched toward his own grave over the next sixteen months, he pushed harder than he had ever pushed before, in some ways happier than he had ever been, in other ways more desperate, more frantic, and yet from start to finish he hung on for dear life and refused to let go. At the very end, when his body had burned out on him and he could no longer leave his bed, he seemed remarkably prepared for what was coming next. Days before his death, he whispered to his friend Robert Barr: “Robert, when you come to the hedge—that we all must go over—it isn’t bad. You feel sleepy—and—you don’t care. Just a little dreamy curiosity—which world you’re really in—that’s all.” Hours before he lapsed into a coma on the last full day of his life, he said to Cora: “I leave here gentle, seeking to do good, firm, resolute, impregnable.”
In the year that was left to him before he coughed up blood for the first time and his condition progressively worsened, he slogged through countless, ever-deepening mudholes of debt by composing more words, more pages, more published work than in any other year of his life. He traveled to Paris, Lausanne, and Ireland, he rode his two horses across the grounds of Brede Place, he went on picnics with Cora and their friends, he entertained visitors by playing his guitar and violin, he doted on his three obstreperous dogs, he attended boat regattas and garden parties, and from time to time he played handball with his writer friend Edwin Pugh, who later wrote: “His hands were miracles of strength and cleverness. He could play handball like a machine-gun. He would fire the ball at me from every conceivable angle, in that green old damp garden of his, with a sort of wild-cat fury.”
He was still and ever the hell-bent athlete, but make no mistake about it: he was dying, and he knew he was dying. He had returned from his lunar voyage looking half dead, so depleted by illness that Jessie Conrad saw him as “a changed man,” and within a few months he understood that the hoped-for physical recovery was not going to happen. To a man named John (possibly Scott Stokes) in mid-August: “Please have the kindness to keep your mouth shut about my health in front of Mrs. Crane hereafter. She can do nothing for me and I am too old to be nursed. It is all up with me but I will not have her scared. For some funny woman’s reason, she likes me. Mind this.” The following month, in a letter to George Wyndham, whose passionate endorsement of Red Badge had helped launch the book in England: “At present I feel like hell.… The truth is that Cuba libre just about liberated me from the base blue world. The clockwork is juggling badly.”
What kept him going was a capacity for hard, unrelenting work and his tightening bond with Cora, his co-conspirator in the fantasy world they built for themselves after they left Oxted and moved to Brede Place in February. The mouse who had run away from his domestic responsibilities back in April was turned into a British country squire who reigned over his lands with his golden-haired consort—who now called him the Duke and in his absence had transformed the conditions of his life. But before they could begin that new life, they first had to extract themselves from the old one. The rent at Ravensbrook had gone unpaid for a year, local merchants were threatening lawsuits, and Self & Whitley’s department store in London was dunning them for a long list of unpaid charges, among them the ninety-nine pounds still owed on Cora’s piano. Within days of his return to England, Crane was appealing to his brother William for a five-hundred-dollar loan, even as he made excuses for not going up to see him during his stopover in New York and continued to lie about the circumstances of his marriage.
My dear William: So I have run by you in the dark again but really my position in England was near to going to smash and I rushed to save it as soon as I could get enough money to leave Havana. Appleton’s cable me that for the past 12 months my royalties amount to thirty-five dollars. Do you know what they mean?
Crane’s letter to his brother William, January 1899. (COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA)
Yes, it is true I am married to an English lady and through her connections we have this beautiful old manor but we are beastly short on ready money owing to my long illness and that is why I want to propose the five hundred loan. Otherwise I may go bankrupt here in February.… Love to all from the wayward brother.
A week later, he wrote to Reynolds:
I am still fuzzy with money troubles and last night a writ was served on me by a leading creditor. I must raise heaven and Earth between now and the middle of February. I must have every pennie that you can wrest from the enemy.… If I can’t raise some money at once I’m going bankrupt. You know what that means. It won’t do. I am going to borrow money from pretty near every body in the world and you must give me all the assistance you are able.… I easily see my way to paying all these people back before the end of the year. I ought to make £1500.—this year anyway. For God sake jump the game with all four feet.
The loan from William was not forthcoming, but other sources of aid charged into the breach. The ever-kind Moreton Frewen put the Cranes in touch with his solicitor, Alfred T. Plant, who took over the management of their finances and worked out arrangements to untangle the complicated messes they had created with their various creditors. To support Plant’s efforts, Crane’s new British agent, James B. Pinker, stepped in as the guarantor for their debts, and finally, in a temporary exchange for his Appleton royalties, the London representative of Crane’s new American publisher, Frederick A. Stokes, agreed to cover the back rent on Ravensbrook. The reunited couple would not be going to the poorhouse, after all. Instead, on February nineteenth, they moved into their ancient manor house, which had more rooms in it than could be counted on the fingers of two hands. No running water, of course, toilet facilities that dated from a time before the invention of toilets, and no electric wires or gas feeds to light the rooms. Beeswax candles would have to do, but for a pair of deracinated Americans whose families had originally come from England, so much the better. They were back in the olde, olde world of their ancestors, occupants of a house that stood just eight miles from the field where the Battle of Hastings had been fought in 1066, which made them the heirs to an almost mythological past. As Cora put it in a letter to Garnett describing Crane’s initial reaction to the house a month before they moved in: “Stephen is mad over the place … [and] said that a solemn feeling of work came over him there.” In other words, they would no longer be living in exile. They imagined they had come home.
What Crane found there was a haven of family life, for in addition to a number of servants and the ghostlike Mrs. Ruedy, the household now included Kate Lyon’s two youngest children, five-year-old Héloïse and four-year-old Barry, Cora’s much-loved little charges who had been staying with her almost nonstop since their father’s stroke.* For a man who adored children as much as Crane did, this was the crowning touch of the new existence his wife had prepared for him: two kids, a capable nanny to watch over them (Lily Burke, who had been with the children for years), and a house large enough to accommodate them all. The Cranes never had children of their own, but they both had a natural gift for parenthood, and one can only imagine the pleasure the Duke must have felt as he strolled around his property holding the hands of his two surrogate offspring. Is it any accident that 1899 was the year he wrote a dozen new stories about children—all of them set in the once-upon-a-time land of Whilomville, the dream site of his own childhood?
